Judy Stern

Video in the Service of

Teaching and Learning at UC Berkeley

Video, Education, and Open ContentMay 23, 2007

Judy Stern

Thread 1: ITP provides training &

consulting in digital video use (90’s)

• Context: “Easy-to-use” media authoring tools, QuickTime

• Goal: Help instructors use technology in ways that encourage active learning

• Outcomes: – Greater out-of-class access to video http://ets.berkeley.

edu/AboutETS/Profiles/goldschmidt.htm– Some degree of interaction– Some student-created media

• Challenges:– Technology “costs”, service constraints– Lack of scalability

http://ets.berkeley.edu/AboutETS/Profiles/goldschmidt.htm








Thread 2: Engineering research starts lecture webcasting as BIBS (2nd half 90’s)

• Context: Decent web video options (Real Video)• Goal: “allow students to review material from a

lecture anytime, anywhere.”• Outcomes:

– Primary use as study tool– More than half the students reported better understanding– Self-paced learning

• Challenges:– Instructor acceptance (issues: attendance, intellectual

property)– Students want ability to search for specific content*

Threads start to come together (2001-2002)

• BIBS (Berkeley Internet Broadcasting System) moves to Media Services, becomes Webcast.Berkeley– http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses

• Media Services merges with ITP (Instructional Technology Program) and becomes ETS (Educational Technology Services)

• Different groups, different staff, although all under same umbrella

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses

…and closer together (2003-2005)

• Adoption of Sakai • Addition of significant development resources

to ETS• User-Centered Design (UCD) process

introduced

• Can we build a Sakai tool that will enable video to be used to improve teaching and learning?

About User Centered Design (UCD)

• Focuses on understanding…– Who are the users?– What are their goals?

• Goals drive a person’s actions• Tasks are things a person does in order to

accomplish his goals

– What are their pain points?

• …to drive design

Pain points we identified in initial research

• Instructor pain points:– Non-webcast users: primarily technical/services– Webcast instructors: Concerns re. attendance

• Student pain points:– Lack of control over what they see– Difficulty finding specific content

• Led to focus on students as users

Web Video Tools Problem Statement

• Problem: Students that wish to take an active, intentional approach to using media for studying and learning and that desire to apply known effective study techniques (including highlighting and returning to significant points and ideas) have difficulties due to the opaque nature of the media.

• Solution: Provide tools that enable students to mark points in time in video and find points for purposes of review, reflection, study, and completing assignments.

Threads come together (2005)

• Problem of “opaqueness” particularly acute for webcast students

• Plans to “grow” webcast.berkeley

• Decision to build tools in Sakai that help students more actively use webcast.berkeley as a study tool

Work we accomplished (UCD Process)

• User research (surveys, interviews, observations)

• User modeling (personas and activity diagrams)

• Requirements definition (context scenarios, requirements matrix)

• Conceptual framework design (for first phase)

Primary PersonaLisa Ng: Conscientious Student

• 2nd year undergraduate • Planning to go to med school, so doesn’t feel she can take risks with classes• Rarely uses webcast as a replacement for class• Relies on computers in lab on campus• Use of webcast is primarily for studying for exams• Good study skills: When studying with text, uses highlighters to mark parts she’ll want to be able to find again & to identify key points or points of confusion. • When doesn’t understand what happened in class, uses webcast to review• Refers to PowerPoint slides when studying

Academic goals:•Get into Med school•Feel confident walking into exams•Be as efficient as possible

Personal goals:•Stay healthy•Have time to spend with friends

http://confluence.media.berkeley.edu/confluence/display/BWV/Personas





Interesting Tensions

• Desire to improve teaching and learning with new tools vs. importance of maintaining existing, mission critical services

• Addressing/promoting specific educational approaches vs. generalizable architecture

More Interesting Tensions

• UCD (reduce work) vs. Active Learning (work harder: more intentional learning, interact more with material, reflection, etc.)

• Student goals (get good grades with minimal effort) vs. “Instructor” goals (have students fully understand material)

Still more interesting tensions

• Increasing wealth of information for students to “use”vs. decreasing amount of time that students have to spend on any one class

• Shared sense-making vs. personal sense-making

…and still more

• Encouraging more interaction in classes vs. providing “lecture” video that’s worth watching by those not in the class

• Meeting needs of our students

vs. meeting the needs of our world audience

The future of the lecture according to Charles Kerns (from Educause Review, May/June 2002))With tools to digitize, index, summarize, link, and annotate video, we can create and distribute streaming-video recordings of lectures, including the slides and whiteboards that were presented. Handouts, alternative illustrations, animations, references, problem sets, and assessments can be indexed and tied to points in the audio-video recording. These clusters of resources and activities can be used as independent modules or learning objects, in some cases replacing the event of the lecture. Indexed recordings allow students to access specific moments in the lecture. Once the lecture recording has nonlinear access, students will move from sequential viewing (as must be done in the face-to-face lecture) to a combination of sequential (with and without pausing) and search-and-review viewings.…New systems allow moments in the video to be annotated with students’ questions, novice and expert explanations, drawings, and other representations of the content. Excerpts from lectures can be pasted into students’ Web page projects and papers to elaborate on the original content. The students’ works can then be linked back to the original learning object. Eventually, the recorded lecture can lose its centrality in the learning object. The lecture thus evolves from a single event to a mediated, “chunked” learning object to a dynamic set of resources. It evolves from a performance to an annotated recording of the performance to a new type of dynamic text.

The future of the lecture according to Charles Kerns, cont’d

…New systems allow moments in the video to be annotated with students’ questions, novice and expert explanations, drawings, and other representations of the content. Excerpts from lectures can be pasted into students’ Web page projects and papers to elaborate on the original content. The students’ works can then be linked back to the original learning object. Eventually, the recorded lecture can lose its centrality in the learning object. The lecture thus evolves from a single event to a mediated, “chunked” learning object to a dynamic set of resources. It evolves from a performance to an annotated recording of the performance to a new type of dynamic text.

Details…

Interaction Framework (phase 1)

• Meets needs of primarypersona

• Designed to supportkeypath scenarios

User research findings

• Greatest “pain points” are finding specific spots in webcast lectures

• Powerpoint slides are often-used reference point for finding• There’s administrative overhead in marking down time code

for getting to or returning to specific points• Students replay specific segments to aid in understanding,

creating study sheets, etc.• Study sheets created for off-line use.• Students jot down notes while watching (don’t always pause)• Students look at more than one webcast in a sitting

• Personas• Archetypes representing

needs of a larger set of constituents

• Based on research

• Activity Diagrams• Model existing user

behavior and interaction with the system

Modeling Activities

Activity Diagrams

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (LZW) decompressor

are needed to see this picture. QuickTime™ and aTIFF (LZW) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Requirements Definition Activities

• Context Scenarios– High-level, no interaction details– Focus is on how the user can achieve her goals

• Requirements Matrix– Identify necessary product characteristics and capabilities– Largely driven by context scenarios– Development team NOT the main audience– Covers data needs (what does each persona need to see), functional needs

(what actions do they need to take), any other consi– derations



WVT Problem Statement, continued

• AffectsStudents that use video or audio content to study or complete assignments

• The impact of which isVideo and audio content isn’t being used to its full potential for teaching and learning.

• A successful solution wouldProvide tools that enable students to mark points in time in video and find points for purposes of review, reflection, study, and completing assignments.

Research Activities

• Surveys– Faculty (10)– webcast.berkeley users in UCB classes (254)– Worldwide webcast.berkeley users (132)

– Observations – 3 students using webcast– Café, lecture

• Interviews– 3 students– 7 faculty members



Surveys told us:



• Bookmarking and video download arethe features that are of greatest interest across the board

• Searchable captions, chaptering, and Powerpoint sync are the features most highly rated by webcast.berkeley students.

• Annotation is less popular than bookmarking. • Interest in knowledge sharing tools is relatively low. • The general webcast.berkeley audience is the only one

highly interested in being notified about posting of video.

Interviews & observations told us:

• Greatest pain points are finding specific spots in webcast lectures

• Powerpoint slides are often-used reference point for finding

• There’s administrative overhead in marking down time code for getting to or returning to specific points

• Students replay specific segments to aid in understanding, creating study sheets, etc.

• Students jot down notes while watching• Students look at more than one webcast in a sitting

Activity Diagrams





Context Scenario 1: Getting Back to

Confusing Part in Lecture



• Lisa is in lecture and realizes she’s confused when the instructor starts talking about mitosis.

• She wants to be sure she’s able to go back and review the areas she’s not clearly understanding

• Later that day she opens up her bSpace course site and goes directly to the webcast for that day.

• She reviews the portions of lecture via the webcast she needed clarification on.

Context Scenario 2: Studying for Exam



• Lisa has an exam coming up and wants to create a study sheet she can use for the next week while on the elliptical @ the gym.

• She gets out notepaper, her textbook, and her binder with PPT “notes” pages and gets comfy on the couch.

• She starts reviewing the powerpoints and notes from the lectures after the last exam. As she does this, she’s making notes (summarizing important topics) on her notepaper. (This will become her study sheet).

• As she’s making her way through the slides she decides it would be useful to hear the instructor’s explanation of DNA replication again.

• She goes to … a point in the webcast where that ppt slide is, and listens. One sentence he says seems to encapsulate the concept for her, so she tries to get it down word for word. Since her prof talks fast and does not always use lay terms, she relistens several times.

• After she feels like she understands, she adds some notes in the study sheet.

• She sees that there were a number of segments that she’d highlighted.

Requirements Matrix

Table of Needs and Elements

UI Framework Definition Activities

• Key path scenarios– Incorporate functional and data needs into the

scenarios

• Table of Needs and Elements– Abstract out specific elements from the key path

scenarios

• Sketch of interaction framework– Still no details– Rectangles! (Panes)

Key path scenario 1



Key path scenario 2