S

CLAS 3.0 “Glacier”

This update introduces a brand new layout to the core video view and interaction functionality of CLAS, taking into account 2 years of users’s

feedback and setting on the first step toward a one-stop Educational Video Management and Interactivity system

Project Owner: Dr. Fred Cutler Designer & architect: Thomas Dang Arts ISIT, University of British Columbia

Why?

S  Apply a 2-year accumulation of UX suggestions from users, lessons learned from navigational data analysis, and results from a 1.5 year behavioural study from Dept. of Psychology

S  The old layout is space constrained in both height and width. You would be hard-pressed to

put any more feature into it without being bogged down by clutter

S  Video browsing and sharing took a backseat to annotation in the old UI, while the browsing

and sharing part is the primary activity for effective use of video in T&L, and annotation is a

value-added feature, while valuable, is dependent on effective navigation

S  Secondary features such as public (unstructured) sharing, downloading video, and

downloading annotations are nice to have, but not an intrinsic part of T&L video usage, so

they are now offloaded to floating side buttons that expand out to floating widgets, no longer

taking up space and user attention on the page

S  An aesthetic update is long overdue

The old UI

The new UI at a glance

Other UX improvements in this update

S  Faster video player buffering and loading

S  A new smart playlist for students, “all I can view in this course”, which aggregates all other playlists—groupwork, personal box, or everyone—into one list of consumables. No matter how instructors organize and design a course or how the access control is set up, each student will always see what can be viewed right after logging in

S  Allow structured browsing of course collections and unstructured search for videos across collections, on the same page

S  A large number of quality polish on the annotation, preview, reply workflows. Introducing one-touch timeline flagging and annotate while playing full-screen

S  The trend heatmap is now integrated into the player scrollbar, making it more useful even when annotation is no longer turned on for a video

The back-end also received enhancements

S  Improvements to the transparent update architecture: a mechanism that allows server side code to force client browsers to abandoned cached versions of js and css files when they are changed, but only when they are changed, preserving the benefit of caching yet allowing even large modifications to be transparent to users on a live session.

S  Query & table definition caching layer in the database for enhanced scalability

S  Automatic student lists from SIS now updates daily, and twice daily during the first month of each term

S  Collections linked with SIS courses automatically get the daily updates when created

S  Manually changing the student list with the add / drop / CSV import tool stops the daily update for that collection

S  Using the bulk import from SIS tool once will resume/start the daily update for that collection

More interactive annotation and comment fields, with unread indicators, private icon, and stretchable to accommodate long threads

Improved yet less intrusive public share widget

Trend heatmap within player

You can now annotate while playing in full-screen

Mobile videos frequently change orientation halfway; you can rotate the player to match it

What is this?

This field video was rotated halfway through when the author

realized that he has been recording a landscape scene in portrait. This would be very difficult to follow without rotating the player too.

Click to rotate player!

“All I can view” smart playlist for students

How “Comment Only” Mode looks in the new layout

How “Video Only” Mode looks in the new layout

How the Course Instruction page looks in the new layout

Mobile UI – mostly the same, except with the new one-touch flagging and smart playlist

New look from within Blackboard Learn (Connect)

New look for previewing and pre-annotating a video

New look for public view & anonymous posting (optional)