Interaction with a Problem Solving Multi Video Lecture: Observing Students from Distance and Traditional Learning Courses

Abstract

The recording of lectures has become common as a way to produce video-based instructional material. Even though the material is often produced using more than one video source - the instructor and the slide, for instance - the result is usually a single video stream. We built a system prototype that allows the recording of several video streams associated with a lecture, including the instructor, projected slides, and information presented by the instructor via a computer (software or other videos, for instance). The several video streams, orchestrated using contextual and control information, are used to produce an interactive multi video object. The interactive nature of our novel multi video object offers students several alternatives for watching the lecture. When the multi video is used by students of traditional and distance learning courses, is opportune to investigate if there are differences in how students watch and interact with the multi video. We captured a problem solving lecture in the theme of Database Design our system. The resulting interactive multivideo object was offered to two groups of students as extra learning material, in preparation for exams. One of the groups attended a traditional, classroom-based course, and the other group attended a distance learning course. In this paper we first give a brief overview of our system, and then we present observations of how both groups of students interacted with the multi video multimedia learning object. We could observe, for instance, that students from the traditional course used the alternative views allowed by multi video more than students from the distance learning course, while students from the distance learning course spent more time watching and interacted more with the interactive multi video.