-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: [email protected] [mailto:community-
[email protected]] Im Auftrag von Judy Stern
Gesendet: Freitag, 17. Februar 2012 00:10
An: Opencast Community
Betreff: Re: [Opencast] Question re: "Learning Analytics& Matterhorn"
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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