The COVID-19 emergency forced educational institutions to adopt measures that would allow them to continue their educative processes in a virtual environment. The various obstacles that students have had to face have affected their engagement and motivation. Identifying factors such as student cognitive engagement in distance learning allows make timely decisions that favor the learning process. In this study, an exploratory investigation was carried out to identify student cognitive engagement in distance lessons, through heart rate, using heart rate bands in university students of the industrial engineering program in Colombia. With the data treatment and the use of a quadrant model, which related a non-self-report method (heart rate) with a self-report method (questionnaire), we obtained the following results: the heart rate has a significant variation during an active learning activity, which can be positive or negative, this indicates that the students experience cognitive engagement; the trend of the heart rate during a lesson depends on internal factors that are directly related to the active learning activities developed, and passive learning activities like the projection of a video can cause an increase in heart rate if students are instructed to do an activity after the video. We expect this study provide input for future research assessing student cognitive engagement using physiological characteristics as a tool.