Web lecture and tags

By Yun Chen on 28 June 2010

Early this week Jeroen and I graduated from the university of applied science in Utrecht, on the subject: Rich Media in Education. What we have researched in the past 6 months is the possibility to enrich the web lecture.

The web lecture is actually the recordings of the lectures and published online for the users. The web lecture gains its popularity amongst the students by providing them the opportunity to “revisit” the lectures anytime, anywhere. It’s not a surprise that more and more universities deploy web lecture as part of their e-learning environment. Not only the students benefit from it, the universities also takes the advantage of the web lecture as promoting purpose.

All seems promising but there are still issues with the interactions between web lecture and its users. Which makes it not necessary unusable but less user friendly. One flaw is the navigation within the video. It’s not hard to imagine that sometimes it’s frustrating to find a particular “scene” in a lengthly video. As we have all experienced this scenario at least once (some people undoubtably more ) in our life. When we are watching a blue-ray film (why DVD when we can have high def), the film is being divided into chapters. This provides us a tool to skip the unwanted parts that we have already seen.

The same approach is applied to the web lecture. Instead of the chapters the web lecture is divided into sections. Each new presentation slide indicates a new section. The idea is that the lecturer will begins a new subject by introducing the new slide. But the reality is far away from this ideal scenario. It is not uncommon that the elapsed time between the two slides will take up to 20 minutes or longer and more subjects will be introduced. How will the users be able to find the particular subject in between that 20 minutes? Sure you can have the lecture facility to break the recording further down into smaller sections. But this requires enormous time and efforts from the lecturer or the recording team.

The solution however is quite simple, at least in our opinion. To start with, we are going to take a look at Information Foraging Theory. This theory compares the way people looking for information to the way people used to find food. The trail left behind by the animals and the plants indicates we can find food in that area. When the amount of the trails and the plants decreases, we change to another area. Same thing happens in the information environment. When the information scent (animal trails, plants) decreases in one information patch (area), we switch to another.

Social tagging is in a popular model of information foraging. It allows the user to pick up the information scent left by other users to continue his search for information. When more users leave their scents behind for themselves and others, a information patch is then created.

However for our research we treat the individual video as the information patch. And the information scents will function as the navigation within the patch. I’m not going into the technical details of our prototype, what I will do is demonstrating basic concept of our prototype. By allowing the users to add tags during the lecture, we then can capture these scents and store them in the database. When playing back the video each tag is placed in the video timeline in the exact position the tagging event took place. This way the user can browses the tags and chose their desired section. Of course the users can add more tags to the video during the play back.

The idea sounds simple and yet logical. More functions became available when tagging implements into the web lecture: sharing tags, adding external study materials to the timeline, automatic fragmentation and more.  The further research on this subject can even implement more complex technique to push the web lecture towards the semantic web. I’m positive about the future functionality. But for now it’s time for beer and world cup.

tagged with: social tagging, web lecture, video, information foraging theory

Comments

There are no comments yet, be the first to post a comment!