Towards sustainable digital learning environments: unmasking the impact of media presentation on adolescents’ visual health

ABSTRACT The shift towards digital learning has raised concerns about the sustainability of education, particularly the visual health issues, such as computer vision syndrome (CVS), caused by prolonged screen learning among adolescent learners. Traditional visual health protection measures are invasive and can interfere with learners’ normal learning experience, highlighting the need for non-invasive and visual-friendly protection methods that can be integrated into the learning process. The relationship between these methods and different learning tasks remains unexplored. We propose a Bi-dimensional eye-movement analysis method alongside a media presentation design that incorporates visual training strategies. By analyzing physiological eye movements (such as blink rate and pupil size) and eye-machine interactions (like fixation duration and fixation count), we examined the effects of different media presentation designs on learners’ visual health in various online learning tasks. Our findings confirm the effectiveness of these designs in promoting visual health, while also revealing that their impact varies depending on the specific learning task. This study highlights the importance of considering visual health and provides valuable insights for the design and development of effective and healthy learning environments.