SMARTVIDEO. SMARTIZATION AND LAYERED LEARNING VIDEOS

The use of video as a teaching material either to give feedback or clarify concepts, is widely used by both the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and many other educational centers.

Our aim is that, in some cases, video will be the main teaching material, a relevant knowledge transmission channel equal to textual channel. That’s why we work on an evolution of the available tools: to add structural elements, navigation and a layer of understanding to the videos in order to allow students to work on the content in a similar way as they do on text.

We will be able also, regarding the analysis of the data generated by the student, to extend our analysis beyond, among other advances, giving context to the data by linking them to scenes and /or pre-defined key concepts.

Finally, the material is enriched by offering students the opportunity to share their concerns, which, once solved by the teacher, will become part of the database of the instructional materials, so that future students can benefit from it.

Thus, Smartvideo project allows to equate the teaching possibilities of video and text.

Summary:
In order to improve teaching methods, when designing new interactive audiovisual materials, we inspire in the use that students give to the digital text contents. These incorporate a layer of understanding that allow students to select parts of the text and incorporate their own annotations. The entries can be tagged as a summary or as a question. The difference between both is that, while the summary is a study aid and can be exported to PDF format, the question can be shared with the teacher and classmates in an integrated classroom forum, allowing to start a dialogue, creating a collaborative learning and nurturing the contents of a solved queries database.
The Smartvideo project consists of transferring the textual annotations structure to the video for it to be comparable in the context of learning.

The Smartvideo project allows:
Sequencing the video into scenes, labeling parts of the video with key concepts in equivalence to thematic indexes. It allows the offering of a double browsing through a sequential index to access specifical timeline points, or through a subject index.
Contextualizing the video as part of the course through objectives and competences.
Deepening into the content by including links and various types of self-evaluation activities.
Including subtitles and transcriptions to have available contents.

Navigation, context, deepening and accessibility elements are presented in layers that can be either turned on and off. Students can consult and use them as navigation elements.

A layer of understanding is also added to the video. Using it, the student can select parts of the video and add annotations. As in the text, notes such as abstracts or doubts can be tagged, and the latter can be shared with the rest of the classroom through the forum.

Finally, this adaptation of both the structure and the layer of understanding will allow us to generalize the video as the main instructional material and to develop the analysis of video consumption allowing us to move towards what we call smartization .
The Smartvideo project, which is currently in a pilot phase, will be implemented in the classrooms in mid-2017.