Development of a System for Assessing the Dynamics of the Lecturer's Speech Expressiveness Indicators During the Lecture

During the last year distance education and online courses have become an intrinsic part of the academic environment. In this respect, the current paper is dedicated to development of the program contributing to advancement of online and distance education. The aim of the study is to assess the lecturer’s speech expressiveness during online classes and lectures by means of providing a specific training system. The development object is a desktop application for the assessment of speech expressiveness indicators such as volume and pace of speech in real time, silence/speech proportion, expressiveness (monotonicity), acoustics, sound clearness (transparency), tonal balance, visibility of sound distortions. Besides, the recommendations for immediate improvement of speech expressiveness evaluation will be outlined. In the course of the current work we examined the issues of lecturers’ speech quality, existing speech expressiveness indicators, as well as methods, tools and algorithms for their assessment. Hence, based on the best solutions, the program was developed. In the result, a set of tools for expressiveness evaluation and the Python desktop application realizing them were provided. Despite the fact that the application needs an additional debugging, it is ready for use and might be implemented in online and distance education. At the same time, the system may be deployed in further research devoted to technological equipment and software for educational and other fields connected with public speaking. The paper comprises 39 pages, 11 illustrations, 1 table. The number of the resources used is 29.