Annotating Video with Open Educational Resources in a Flipped Classroom Scenario
AAnnotating Video with Open Educational Resources in a Flipped Classroom Scenario
Olivier Aubert, University of Nantesolivier . aubert @ univ - nantes . frJoscha Jaeger, Merz Akademiejoscha . jaeger @ merz - akademie . de
Abstract
A wealth of Open Educational Resources is now available, and beyond the first and evidentproblem of finding them, the issue of articulating a set of resources is arising. When usingaudiovisual resources, among different possibilities, annotating a video resource withadditional resources linked to specific fragments can constitute one of the articulationmodalities. Annotating a video is a complex task, and in a pedagogical context, intermediaryactivities should be proposed in order to mitigate this complexity.In this paper, we describe a tool dedicated to supporting video annotation activities. It aims atimproving learner engagement, by having students be more active when watching videos byoffering a progressive annotation process, first guided by providing predefined resources,then more freely, to accompany users in the practice of annotating videos.
Introduction
There exists a huge number of Open Education Resources (OERs) of various types, innumerous domains. OERs offer great pedagogical content, but somehow lack in articulation.One of the ways to enhance their pedagogical potential is to provide explicit links betweenresources, exposing some knowledge articulation, defining a path to follow or a graph ofrelations to explore.This activity is at the heart of knowledge work, but its realisation as a shareable andmodifiable entity is not obvious to many people. One of the goals of current teaching shouldbe to teach students how to explicitly link these resources between themselves, so as to addexplicit relationships to the existing knowledge.Many OERs are text-based or image-based, but an increasing number relies on audiovisualcontent, in part due to the technological availability of capture means and the general capturepolicy carried out in some institutions. While hypertext links are now commonly used andunderstood, hypervideo links, i.e. links from/to fragments of video documents, are lesscommon and raise a number of specific issues, given the dynamic nature of video documents.Thus while video documents are now more and more openly accessible and available, andconstitute a learning material of great pedagogical value, their potential is not always fullyexploited (Hobbs, 2006). Bringing the learners to a more active attitude while watching videodocuments can be achieved through various pedagogical practices and tools (Bossewitch,2011; Zahn, 2010; Schwan and Riempp, 2004). We propose here a tool that can be used topromote video-based active learning, instead of passive watching, through the use ofannotations, illustrated here through a flipped classroom scenario (Strayer, 2007). In addition,collaboration features promote group activities in order to invite learners to build their ownshared knowledge (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 2006).In this article, we describe a software framework dedicated to supporting video annotationactivities, which can be tested at http :// ocwc . open - hypervideo . org/. It aims at 1/ improvinglearner engagement, by having the students be more active when watching videos; 2/ offering progressive annotation process, first guided then more free, to accompany the users in thepractice of annotating videos and building hypervideos; 3/ promoting a constructivistapproach by offering collaboration and discussion features.
Video annotations and usage
We consider here video annotations as pieces of information linked to a specific fragment of avideo. They can be of different natures: textual comments, images, other audio or videoresources, or more generally an URL to any resource. These contents are anchored to specificfragments of the original video document, specifying begin and end timecodes (which may beidentical when the user only wants to annotate a specific point in the video instead of adurative fragment).Depending on the usage context, annotations may also be associated with various metadata,such as information about their author or creation date, or some way of categorizing them.Annotations constitute essential metadata to enable audiovisual documents handling beyondbasic playing. They are required to offer indexing capabilities, either through basic chapteringof audiovisual documents or full-text search through time-aligned transcriptions for instance.They also can be used as a navigational aid for interactive video usage. Hereafter, they alsocan form the basis for the production of new kinds of documents, combining audiovisualdocuments and its metadata, which can qualify as hypervideos (Aubert and Prié, 2005).Video annotation production and usage shares some common concerns with text or imageannotation: all require anchoring schemes, raise issues around the combined evolution of bothoriginal data and its metadata, and introduce new licensing issues (which may target thedocument, its metadata or the combination of both). Moreover, the dynamic and temporalnature of audiovisual documents brings additional concerns, especially in annotation editionand visualisation. The complexity of generic annotation processes can thus require a fairexpertise and involvement. That is why it is essential to propose more specific annotationtools, more fitted to specific tasks, in order to simplify their usage. We propose here such atool, targeting a pedagogical context where pre-defined resources are provided and users haveto assimilate them and associate them to appropriate fragments of a video.
Usage scenario
We will illustrate our proposal through an example usage scenario. In a science historycourse, a teacher records a lecture in order to use it in a flipped classroom setup: his studentswill have to watch the lecture recording by themselves, and they will later have a interactivesession together where the teacher can answer questions.To support this flipped classroom setup, before publishing his lecture the teacher providesadditional resources such as images, texts or web resources that he publishes along the lecturerecording. The learner tasks are twofold: first, they have to link the provided resources toppropriate moments of the lecture, as an exercise, through a simple interface, presented infigure 1. Second, they can annotate the recording with free-text annotations, identifying andexpliciting the parts of the recording that they would like to talk about in class. The first stepof the process encourages learners to be more active when watching a video, by taking intoaccount other existing, predefined resources and linking them to appropriate parts of thelecture. Moreover, in order to properly achieve the task, they have to examine everyassociated resource, and memorize part of their information. The second step of the process,free-text annotation of specific lecture fragments, involves explicitation of difficult parts or ofemerging ideas to be discussed in the classroom, and is useful for the teacher as a feedback,but also for the learners as a way to express concerns or ideas. The outcome of this phase thenconsists, for each student, in an annotated video, where pedagogical resources aresynchronized with the original recording.
Figure 1: resource linking interface - predefined resources have to be associated by the learners at appropriatemoments of the reference video document.
A collaboration activity can then be carried out, built up upon the produced material: the classis divided into smaller learner groups, where each member confronts his annotations (linkedresources and comments) with the annotations of the other members, thanks to asimultaneous display of annotations, as shown in figure 2. Learners are then encouraged todebate on the correct timing for resources or links, in order to achieve some consensus thatcan be presented to the rest of the class. The integration of a revision history system couldthen bring a track of the different modifications, in order to possibly have the group reflect onits own group activity. igure 2: collaborative comparison interface - the annotations produced by the different learners or groupsare displayed simultaneously, in order to foster debate and discussion. This process leads to a consolidationof annotated resources in a main timeline, generating a joint group work that can be presented and sharedwith other learners.
Developments and future work
Discussion
This project focuses on interface issues. However, finding appropriate open educationalresources is quite time-consuming and would greatly benefit from some support from otherresearch projects such as the LinkedUp project (Dietze et al, 2013), which aims at developingtools and methods for the exploitation of public, open data available on the Web, in particularby educational institutions. A semi-automatic approach based on semantic metadata aboutexisting OERs could be leveraged to facilitate the finding of resources by teachers andstudents. To this end, our resource creation and annotation interface should be augmented toadd components that assist authors in finding appropriate resources through recommendationsbased on semantic metadata. By working with semantic concepts and linked open data,authors will also be able to discover previously unknown relationships during the process ofgathering adequate resources. Evaluating possible interfaces and interaction methods forthese tasks will be part of future developments.Video annotation is not an end in itself: it is one of the tools that is now becoming availableon the pedagogical palette. Beyond video documents, annotation of any kind of document isan integral part of any scholarly work, and tools should be provided to accompany thispractice on a variety of medias. Moreover, beyond the availability of such tools, appropriateintegration in pedagogical scenarios and practices must be experimented and studied (Sankeyand Hunt, 2013).
Conclusion
We propose a new open-source tool aiming at the development of new pedagogical practices,taking advantage of existing audiovisual OERs. In order to make learners more familiar withthe practice of video annotation, a guided approach is proposed in a first phase, based onpredefined resources proposed by the tutor. Then, learners can engage in a more open andflexible way with the video document by producing their own annotations, and carry out acollaborative activity around them. After the design and implementation phase, basic initialests are encouraging and we are looking for more experimentation opportunities to validateour initial ideas.ReferencesAubert, O. & Prié, Y. (2005) Advene: Active Reading through Hypervideos.
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