Fundamental Frequency as an Alternative Method for Assessing Mental Fatigue of Distance Learning Teachers

Online education is gaining ground in our society due to the introduction of new educational technologies and the pandemic situation we are experiencing. The experience is showing that online teaching makes an extra demand on mental resources as compared to face-to-face teaching. For this reason, we are in need of methodologies to measure this demand for resources in order to propose how to mitigate it. In this paper we propose a methodology based on acoustic voice analysis to measure the mental resource demand of teachers. This methodology is similar to that being used successfully in other fields. The advantages of this methodology are that it does not require any costly and intensive instrumentation to record and analyse data. The only two instruments that the methodology requires are a tape recorder and a software for analysing the acoustic parameters of the voice that can be installed on the teachers’ own computer.