Abstract:

There are several authors who advocate the contribution of television (TV) and video in the user's learning, whether in formal teaching and learning contexts, such as the Telescola (a Portuguese programme started in the second half of the last century for students of rural areas) and more recently the Open University, or in non-formal learning contexts, combining educational content to entertainment content and / or information.

The Internet, in turn, has contributed to a greater and faster access to information and enabled the cooperation in order to create a collective intelligence.
Moreover, the convergence of different medias in the same device (particularly mobile devices), enable users to access content in a more immediate and portable manner, which may influence the actual way these contents are used and consumed.

The resistance of the students in the use of learning support tools and mechanisms currently used triggered the need to develop software that could address this challenge. Therefore, this work presents an interactive video platform (in a Web environment) for multidevice (e.g. TV, computer, mobile devices) in its different components: the prototyping and the evaluation through usability tests by two groups of individuals.

In terms of the prototyping we'll present the development of the platform, in terms of architecture, graphic interface and main features of the application. Some of the main features of this web video application are the possibility to enrich the videos with other content (e.g., text, images, slideshows, URL's, audio, video), the interoperability with social networks (for sharing or importation of content), and the possibility to interact with peers or with teachers with specific forums for each video (where the messages are actually linked to a specific time inside the video).

Regarding the evaluation we'll present the usability tests carried out in three sessions by two groups of evaluators (on composed by specialists in educational technologies and the other by education and multimedia communication bachelor degree students). The key findings of the present study point to different behaviours of teachers and students; the first group is more active and demanding and the second group is more passive and with higher levels of satisfaction regarding the prototype’s evaluation. In what concerns functionalities to integrate, the requirements are identical for both groups, with emphasis on the content enrichment (tool that lets us incorporate other content over the video), chapters division and also the possibility of interaction by text, whether in a private setting (notes) or in a public one (reviews), with the particularity that all of these options are linked to a specific time of the video.

Keywords:

Television, web, evaluation, video application, usability tests.