Supporting constructivist learning in a multimedia presentation system

2008 38th Annual Frontiers in Education Conference

Hanson

2008

For more than a decade, the RIPPLES group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has developed and deployed content delivery systems to support on-campus and distance education. This has been an effective but expensive approach because of its dependence on content captured by human operators and substantial production effort. Presentations Automatically Organized from Lectures (PAOL) is a classroom-capture system that is transparent to and places no constraints (teaching style or pedagogy) on a lecturer. PAOL is unique-no other system can capture unconstrained computer-based materials, capture whiteboard writing and drawing, and produce a speaker video without requiring preinstalled software, electronic whiteboards, or special training. PAOL uses highresolution cameras, a computer screen capture device, and a wireless microphone to automatically create multimedia Flash presentations, which include a digitally edited instructor video, enhanced images of all material presented by computer or written/drawn on a whiteboard, and an index to support navigation. The PAOL system has been used extensively during system development in several varied settings. We report on usability studies to determine the most effective presentation formats and interfaces and our efforts to capture a full course to further evaluate the impact on teaching and learning.

Section: Adapting the Manic Content Delivery Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic capture and presentation creation from multimedia lectures

Dickson

2008 38th Annual Frontiers in Education Conference

Hanson

2008

“…As high bandwidth access became more widely available, CD-MANIC remained a good solution for delivering multimedia content to distance learners due to its portability and "anytime, anyplace" approach. MANIC has been extended to add support for navigation, notation, and collaboration so that it better supports a constructivist teaching style for distance and on-campus education, including adding extended search capability [5], a synchronous collaboration mechanism [6], and a Learner Logger [4] tool that captures all student interactions. Learner Logger data provide feedback to the instructor and instructional designers.…”

Section: The Ripples Projectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applying Information Technology to Improve Teaching and Learning in an African University

Obuobi

Proceedings. Frontiers in Education. 36th Annual Conference

Watts

2006

This paper describes collaboration between the University of Cape Coast in Ghana and the University of Massachusetts Amherst to apply innovations in education and educational technology to the challenges facing Cape Coast as they attempt to meet the demands of the 21st century. Ghanaian Universities face increasing population growth and enrollment, inadequate infrastructure, poor connectivity, inadequate funding, inadequate educational resources and staffing, and a persistent "brain drain" of qualified instructors. With a multitude of students waiting for higher education, external factors such as globalization, information technology growth, and international markets have left almost all African Universities stranded. Despite these problems, a critical mass of highly qualified professionals and teachers are needed to accelerate economic and academic development on the continent as a whole. The adoption of innovative teaching and learning methods to enhance teaching and learning is essential.

“…Production was reduced to 1-3 production hours per hour of MANIC presentation. Over time, additional functionality such as contextual searches (Kumela et al, 2004), integrated note taking, and collaboration (Ray et al, 2004) was incorporated with in the MANIC browser. The current Java-based version, jMANIC (Wallace et al, 2006), was designed with three goals in mind: cross-platform compatibility (provided by Java), multiple modes of delivery (streamed, downloaded, and CD/DVD), and easy customization.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic identification and storage of significant points in a computer‐based presentation

Dickson

Interactive Technology and Smart Education

Hanson

2007

We describe an automatic classroom capture system that detects and records significant (stable) points in lectures by sampling and analyzing a sequence of screen capture frames from a PC used for presentations, application demonstrations, etc. The system uses visual inspection techniques to scan the screen capture stream to identify points to store. Unlike systems that only detect and store slide presentation transitions, this system detects and stores significant frames in any style of computer‐based lecture using any program. The system is transparent to the lecturer and requires no software or training. It has been tested extensively on lectures with multiple applications and pen‐based annotations and has successfully identified “significant” frames (frames that represent stable events such as a new slide, bullet, figure, inked comment, drawing, code entry, application entry etc.). The system can analyze over 20000 frames and typically identifies and stores about 100 significant frames within minutes of the end of a lecture. A time stamp for each saved frame is recorded and will in the future be used to compile these frames into a jMANIC multimedia record of the class.