VideoDoc : combining videos and lecture notes for a better learning experience

Abstract

Videos provide learners an engaging way to learn material, but they are not easy to navigate. Electronic textbooks are easy to navigate and help learners review material they have already seen, but they are not very engaging. VideoDoc combines videos and textbooks to provide learners with a single resource that engages them and is easy to navigate. The interface can be played like a video or read like a textbook. Lecture videos and their corresponding transcripts are broken into sections by topic, and each section also has screenshots of representative video frames. A user can navigate the interface by scrolling through the sections or clicking on section titles in an interactive table of contents. A VideoDoc lecture is automatically generated from a time-annotated text transcript and a labeling of talking-head video frames, and an instructor can fine-tune section boundaries and add section titles using an editing interface. Through a user study we found that VideoDoc helped users more easily navigate lecture videos, but some users had trouble learning how to use features of the editing interface.