Abstract:

The process of annotating text dates as far back as around 1000AD when it became a prominent activity in Talmudic commentaries [1]. Annotations on the margin of a book even got a name in 1819, when the word marginalia was coined.

Not surprisingly hence, as soon as the web matured, research on the annotation of web pages became a research topic (see e.g. [2]). However, it was not until recently that actually usable annotation framework gained popularity. They were allowed by the technology of the Web 2.0. Also, shared annotation of e-books has been recently explored (see.g. [3]).

There seems to be almost universal agreement that note taking activity favours learning, probably since the student has to take an active attitude, rather than passively attempt to absorb knowledge. Our own research showed indications that students who actively take notes and also review them perform on the average better than those who do not [4].

Our motivation hence was to push students to take notes during lectures, and we intended to combine this with the recording of videolectures.

Recording traditional lectures in the form of videos is a practice that dates back to the end of the nineties (see [5] for a review). Not only this practice becomes a substitution for students who cannot attend classes: videos can be used as ingredients for a flipped classroom approach (see e.g. [6]). When videos are available, students use them also to selectively review portions of lectures. In order to find the relevant portion of a lecture, tools and functionalities are needed. For instance, it is possible to seek a particular instant by using a time-bar or by listening a portion at higher speed. Semantic markers, such as indicator of slide transition, slide title or content also facilitate search. To make this more effective, we investigated the possibility for a student to take (electronic) notes in class, and have them synchronised with the movie of the lecture being recorded in that moment. We believe that such a form of annotation, which ends up annotating a multimedia resource, could facilitate the task of reviewing particular portions of a lecture.

Hence, we developed a system that allows performing such operations. In this paper we will describe the requirements and the architecture of the system we developed. Experimentation in presently in progress, so validation of our idea will be reported in future elsewhere.

References:
[1] 1.Wolfe, J. (2002) Annotation technologies: A software and research review, Computers and Composition, Volume 19, Issue 4, December 2002, Pages 471-497
[2] 2.Kahan J., Koivunen M-R., Prud'Hommeaux, E. and Swick, R.R: Annotea: An Open RDF Infrastructure for Shared Web Annotations, in Proc. of the WWW10 Int.l Conf, Hong Kong, 2001
[3] 3.Hwang H.K. and Ronchetti M., Q-Book: multimedia annotation tool for e-books, EdMedia 2014 - Tampere, Finland, June 23-26, 2014 p.2534
[4] 4.Ashenafi M.M., Riccardi G., Ronchetti M., Using students’ collaboration to improve active participation to university courses with a large number of attendees, Proceedings of ICERI2016 Conf., p 7249
[5] 5.Ronchetti, M. "Using video lectures to make teaching more interactive" Int. J. on Emerging Technologies in Learning, v. vol. 5, n. no. 2 (2010), p. 45-48
[6] 7.Ronchetti, M. Video-Lectures over Internet: The Impact on Education in E- Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning: Next Generation Environments, New York: IGI Global, 2011, pp. 253-270.

Keywords:

Videolectures, annotation, active learning.