Hi everybody, we are three spanish people : Sara Arias Macía, Pedro Blanco Pascual and Juan Carlos González Moreno, and we want to show and share with you our proposal about active learning through hypervideo in a e-learning environment like Moodle.
First of all, a little biographical sketch:
Sara Arias Macía and Pedro Blanco Pascual are actually preparing the PhD on the Intelligent and Adaptable Software Systems program (http://ssia.ei.uvigo.es) at Vigo’s University under the direction and supervision of Dr. Juan Carlos González Moreno. They are working since January 10, 2011 at INSA (INgenieria de Software Avanzado, in english Advanced Software Engineering) in Ourense (Spain). They have participated in the development of electronic commerce applications for the textile company Inditex (on the sites for: ZaraHome, Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho and Uterqüe) and currently they are involved in their maintenance.
Dr. Juan Carlos González Moreno is actually the Coordinator of the Master and PhD. Program on Intelligent an Adaptable Software Systems at Vigo’s University. He has more than 23 years of experience in Higher Education on different Spanish Universities; topics covered include Intelligent Agents, Software Engineering and Programming Languages among others. He is the Leader of the Research Group on Intelligent Web Agents and he was involved as researcher and main researcher on several National and Regional Research Spanish Project related to the integration of the new Technologies on tools to support Higher Education.
Next, we are going to present our proposal, which consists in two functional prototypes developed as final works of the Intelligent and Adaptable Software Systems Master and based in the idea that active learning through hypervideo is becoming an increasingly valued model that complement the academic distance education or business distance education, but an efficient exploitation of their potential has not yet been reached.
Both works were developed using Adobe Flex Framework, so SWF Activity Module (http://docs.moodle.org/20/en/SWF_Activity_Module), developed by Matt Bury (http://blog.matbury.com) was required for their inclusion in Moodle.
Prototype 1: VideoMoodle
The main aim of this work is to present in a realistic way how to incorporate video tagging as a new feature into the well known eLearning tool: Moodle. This kind of technologies favors the introduction of new learning skills because of their potential to be used as an educational resource to support teaching. This is due not only by the richness of multimedia content, which facilitates assimilation and comprehension of information by the student but also for its accessibility and availability. The proposal has been developed as a new module (VideoMoodle), which facilitates the upload and video tagging process by using a simple and intuitive interface.
The concept of hypervideo can be defined as the sight of audiovisual material associated with an annotation structure. The VideoMoodle framework proposes an adaptation, extension and improvement for the new teaching opportunities. It facilitates the learning process and educational work carried out by teachers, using as an educational resource the videos and a metadata structure associated. This eLearning software tool explores new learning possibilities by combining videos with textual annotation and multiple hyper-links to other videos, resources or activities.
In this way, the learning experience is completely tailored to students.
For more information visit http://lab34.ei.uvigo.es/~samacia/
Prototype 2: MicroeLVlogging
Social networking services and vlogging (acronym from video blogging) systems are growing fast on the latest years, but an efficient exploitation of their potential has not yet been reached in academia. The work presented in this abstract aims at covering several domains: hypervideo modelling, document annotation, and practices sharing and emergence.
It is based on a Moodle module previously developed for video Management. Taking into account the existence of a high number of students that could not follow the training activities proposed in traditional lectures. The module has been built to facilitate the access to the teaching information and to the proposed activities. The underlying idea of this work is that nowadays the role of video in human communication has become as important (if not more) as the played by text. Moreover, in recent years the technology has evolved so much that is possible to develop new models of data transfer for browsers based on the use of video as a communication channel.
At this work, it is presented a partial solution on the way to build a real tool for microvlogging that would be integrated with an e-learning Platform. The MicroeLVlogging framework, presented in this paper, proposes an adaptation, extension and improvement of the e-learning tool Moodle to incorporate the new social networking services using microvlogging.
Their main aim is to facilitate the collaboration between pairs (students) and provide teachers helpful information about the learning process. In the actual educational context students have been trained enough in such kind of systems, in fact it is possible they prefer it to more traditional ones.
For more information visit http://lab34.ei.uvigo.es/~pbpascual/
