Much of what Chris reports echoes (at least vaguely) what we've found through
user research (surveys and interviews) at Berkeley: students aren't terribly
interested in annotating webcasts (as they currently know them), especially if
such annotations are to be shared with others (part of this clearly stems from
competitiveness.) Otoh, students are extremely interested in anything that
supports their use of webcast as a study tool (bookmarking, private
annotations, ability to search for text...anything that makes the video less
opaque). And, when we observed students using webcast, some were even doing the
manual generation of the study sheet that Chris' system creates as a pdf. (One
such student described how she used the study sheet while working out on an
elliptical machine.)
This also jives with what's been "reported" about the limitations of "social
learning" in the context of studying [1]:
> Many students, in fact, prefer sticking to their own notes on courses, rather
> than trusting friends. Focus groups conducted on behalf of GradeGuru, a
> note-sharing site, found that many undergraduates don't see much value in
> passing their notes to others or consulting the jottings of their classmates.
>
> "Studying is still largely an independent endeavor," says Jonathan D. Becker,
> an assistant professor of educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth
> University, who led the recent focus groups as a consultant to GradeGuru.
> "College students study in groups to some degree, but from what students say
> they don't find them terribly beneficial."
At the risk of stating the obvious, repeating what's already been said, and
probably oversimplifying), I'd say this discussion is highlighting the
distinction between 1) using lecture capture "as is" (simply record the lecture
and make it available to students who, left to their own devices, will happily
use it as an additional study tool) and 2) the use of lecture capture to do
innovative things in teaching. (Hmmm, yes, probably what Brian was saying:
"review & study vs. integrated into class coursework")
As Chris suggests, many instructors and students (the ones his work has
supported, the ones we've served and surveyed here at Berkeley) are in the
former ( "as is"/study tool) category. The instructors are not going to make
much use of annotation features if it requires extra work. Respectively, many
of their students will make use of "note-taking" functionality, because it
supports their normal study habits, but won't make much use of social learning
features. Of course, this could be changing, but it doesn't seem to be changing
terribly quickly...while some of the data we collected at Berkeley is over 5
years old, we heard some of the same sentiments in interviews just last year.
(I'm not sure if I completely understand what you're describing about the use
of student notes for video enrichment, Chris, but it sounds pretty powerful in
terms of even further enhancing the usefulness of webcasts to aid in studying
without putting additional burden on instructors/students; I won
der, though, if there are privacy and intellectual property issues to
overcome, not to mention information overload.)
Otoh, for instructors who are wanting/needing to teach in less traditional
("lecture-based") ways, the ability to annotate lectures (or segments of
lectures) may be exceedingly powerful (the recent buzz around "flipping" the
classroom plays in here, too). And if they design their course in ways that
make it advantageous (defined in many different ways) for students to annotate,
students will likely use these features, too. I think Brian comes from a long
tradition of projects of this latter kind (pedagogical innovation). Such change
doesn't occur simply by providing a good set of tools (much more typically has
to be done in terms of instructional design, e.g. "constraints designed by an
instructor"), but good tools are critical.
Reflecting on Andy's question (re. "annotations and long form note taking
could and should live side-by-side within Matterhorn") it feels that modularity
(allowing for the ability to pick and choose depending on context) is pretty
important.
Judy
[1] http://chronicle.com/article/New-Social-Software-Tries-to/125542/
On Feb 16, 2012, at 11:25 AM, Christopher Brooks wrote:
> 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
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