Hi Andy, > > With respect to annotations I have to admit I have some very > > specific feelings on the topic. Based on a prototype we piloted > > with lecture capture I don't believe timeline annotations will be > > used by students. Instead, a more free flowing note taking method > > is something they want. We halted our investigations here, but the > > last survey we ran showed students were really interested in having > > built in note taking facilities, and a second pilot showed that > > these notes tended to be quite rich in semantics. I think > > note-taking, as opposed to annotations, would be an excellent > > predictor of student outcomes. > > When you have the time, could you unpack the comments above further? > Are your feelings regarding annotations vs. note-taking based solely > on the prototype or do you have supporting research? if you have > research, would you mind sharing? Am I correct to assume that you > believe annotations and long form note taking could and should live > side-by-side within Matterhorn?
We ran several different pilots in a class before choosing a note-taking method that we figured had a larger chance of success, then we ran it in a study across multiple courses. I think Brian introduces a nice narrative for how instructors might use annotation tools, but in my experience instructors rarely reviewed their lecture videos and wouldn't be willing to (at least not across all courses) make annotations of their lectures. Our longer format note-taking provided some features that annotations didn't, so the two systems weren't rigorously compared against one another. In our app, notes were associated with "scenes" of the video (segments using OCR). This allowed a user to print a pdf representing "powerpoint overview" of their notes for offline studying. We also introduced collaborative features in that all notes were shared with other students (though they were not wikiable). If I were to go back to this, I think the biggest immediate wins would be just letting students take freeform notes and timestamp enteries in the notebook with the position of the video so that they could click a note and see related content. Further, I think keeping a PDF export would be valuable based on the usage from students. As a research consideration, I would look at how courses build notes in a wiki-like fashion while watching videos. Wikis of temporal artifacts (like lecture videos) are pretty much unexplored I think, so novel interaction mechanisms may be lurking just beneath the surface. Jumping back to annotations, I think Brians comments are really good. I know of a system used here in medical education that allows instructors to annotate their lecture videos with links, questions, etc. I think this is a great step forward, but it puts more demands on the instructors than just "lecture capture", and thus requires more significant buy in. What I would like to see instead is to have segments of video enriched for search/discovery from student notes. Students provide compelling semantics that could be used to help understand the context of a given video segment. This segment can then be used in recommendation systems, content management systems, etc. to pull students into the video from their other course content (imagine a course syllabus where topics are dynamically mapped to segments in the video that they are relevant to just from mining the OCR, speech, and note data; in this way the syllabus evolves and fills out as the lectures are completed without further intervention from the instructor). We did a thought experiment to consider how lecture capture might be used to completely replace an lcms, and what that might look like. For brick and mortar universities, the lecture is often *the artifact* of learning. Lectures are under fire more and more over the years by educational researchers, but they remain popular because they are historical, scale well to larger groups, and are time efficient (for instructors anyways). What if instead of trying to use ed tech to replace the lecture, we focused solely on augmenting the lecture with links, discussions, comments, notes, etc. Then the entire course becomes grounded in the hourly meeting of the cohort, but maintains the ability to grow asynchronously in different directions. We didn't go far with it; I think it would require a significant integration of tools instead of a mashup of tools that content management systems currently provide, so repurposing tools would be difficult to do in a tractable amount of time. Regards, Chris -- Christopher Brooks, BSc, MSc ARIES Laboratory, University of Saskatchewan Web: http://www.cs.usask.ca/~cab938 Phone: 1.306.966.1442 Mail: Advanced Research in Intelligent Educational Systems Laboratory Department of Computer Science University of Saskatchewan 176 Thorvaldson Building 110 Science Place Saskatoon, SK S7N 5C9 _______________________________________________ Community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/community To unsubscribe please email [email protected] _______________________________________________
