I enjoyed this week’s presentation of the idea for View Xstreme Suite, an exciting video technology with a very compelling value proposition: “we can save your University thousands of dollars for every recorded class.” But Paul Frank’s comment echoed my own sentiments exactly: why limit yourself to “recreating the live experience of a classroom”? In some ways, no video experience over the internet will ever recreate the classroom: you’ll never be able eat the snacks, or shake the hand of the presenter. But video has many affordances that a live classroom doesn’t. Why not aim for something even better?
As I mentioned in class, the primitive form of many media is an attempt to mimic real life experiences. Early movies were essentially filmed plays; early recordings were recorded live performances with no post-production editing; post-Sgt Pepper’s, every good music producer works the post-production suite as another set of instruments.
The most ambitious vision of future video learning I’ve seen is in the recent Star Trek film, in which young Vulcans, including Spock receive scholastic training from an 360 immersive video screen, and Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise uses a wraparound, very tactile video display to scroll through reality.
While these may be decades away, current technology has many affordances that a live lecture class doesn’t:
- The ability to zoom in on one part of the field of vision, which the View Xstreme technology brilliantly enables.
- The ability to scroll through time and highlight specific sections of the video.
- Note-taking within the application that is instantly connected by a link to its source timecode from the lecture
- The ability to label sections of the video with text or visual or audio identifiers. As discussed in class, these “chapter markers” could be seeded by the instructor, and then developed through crowd-sourcing. If a classmate felt that one particular passage was useful, that could be shared with other viewers.
- The ability to watch lectures at a fast speed. From personal experience watching long documentary interviews, most speakers can be understood at 150% or 125% speed. Many viewers who want an time-efficient way to hear material that they mostly already understand would probably enjoy this option.
- Instant assessments, personalized for one’s learning ability, either in text or audio form, to test what one is comprehending from a lecture.
- Audio-only mode.
- Audio-mostly mode, which would allow you to listen to just the audio until the few parts of the lecture that require you to see some visuals. The video would alert you as to when, if at all, you need to look up.
- Foreign language subtitles for English as a Second Language learners.
These are only some of the possible extensions of a filmed classroom application. Most require more work on the content production side, but because video can scale so well, it might be worth that extra effort creating great video content so as to enroll more distance students.
You are right in saying technology can never replace classroom experience, but it sure does facilitate learning. Sometimes attending the lecture and have a follow-up fast paced video to review it increases the understanding multiple times. I also got to know about the ViewXtreme technology which is quite exciting. I imagine classrooms around the world playing videos from professors at Stanford and where not, zooming on in the equations and get a virtual classroom experience in the remotest place.
Education is not only about content now, its also about the packaging and delivery, like everything else…