7,085 research outputs found
Facilitating the creation of interactive multi-device Learning Objects using an online authoring tool
Learning Objects facilitate reuse leading to cost and time savings as well as to the enhancement of the quality of educational resources. However, teachers find it difficult to create or to find high quality Learning Objects, and the ones they find need to be customized. Teachers can overcome this problem using suitable authoring systems that enable them to create high quality Learning Objects with little effort. This paper presents an open source online e-Learning authoring tool called ViSH Editor together with four novel interactive Learning Objects that can be created with it: Flashcards, Virtual Tours, Enriched Videos and Interactive Presentations. All these Learning Objects are created as web applications, which can be accessed via mobile devices. Besides, they can be exported to SCORM including their metadata in IEEE LOM format. All of them are described in the paper including an example of each. This approach for creating Learning Objects was validated through two evaluations: a survey among authors and a formal quality evaluation of 209 Learning Objects created with the tool. The results show that ViSH Editor facilitates educators the creation of high quality Learning Objects
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Multimodal Indexing of Presentation Videos
This thesis presents four novel methods to help users efficiently and effectively retrieve information from unstructured and unsourced multimedia sources, in particular the increasing amount and variety of presentation videos such as those in e-learning, conference recordings, corporate talks, and student presentations. We demonstrate a system to summarize, index and cross-reference such videos, and measure the quality of the produced indexes as perceived by the end users. We introduce four major semantic indexing cues: text, speaker faces, graphics, and mosaics, going beyond standard tag based searches and simple video playbacks. This work aims at recognizing visual content "in the wild", where the system cannot rely on any additional information besides the video itself. For text, within a scene text detection and recognition framework, we present a novel locally optimal adaptive binarization algorithm, implemented with integral histograms. It determines of an optimal threshold that maximizes the between-classes variance within a subwindow, with computational complexity independent from the size of the window itself. We obtain character recognition rates of 74%, as validated against ground truth of 8 presentation videos spanning over 1 hour and 45 minutes, which almost doubles the baseline performance of an open source OCR engine. For speaker faces, we detect, track, match, and finally select a humanly preferred face icon per speaker, based on three quality measures: resolution, amount of skin, and pose. We register a 87% accordance (51 out of 58 speakers) between the face indexes automatically generated from three unstructured presentation videos of approximately 45 minutes each, and human preferences recorded through Mechanical Turk experiments. For diagrams, we locate graphics inside frames showing a projected slide, cluster them according to an on-line algorithm based on a combination of visual and temporal information, and select and color-correct their representatives to match human preferences recorded through Mechanical Turk experiments. We register 71% accuracy (57 out of 81 unique diagrams properly identified, selected and color-corrected) on three hours of videos containing five different presentations. For mosaics, we combine two existing suturing measures, to extend video images into in-the-world coordinate system. A set of frames to be registered into a mosaic are sampled according to the PTZ camera movement, which is computed through least square estimation starting from the luminance constancy assumption. A local features based stitching algorithm is then applied to estimate the homography among a set of video frames and median blending is used to render pixels in overlapping regions of the mosaic. For two of these indexes, namely faces and diagrams, we present two novel MTurk-derived user data collections to determine viewer preferences, and show that they are matched in selection by our methods. The net result work of this thesis allows users to search, inside a video collection as well as within a single video clip, for a segment of presentation by professor X on topic Y, containing graph Z
Structuring lecture videos for distance learning applications. ISMSE
This paper presents an automatic and novel approach in structuring and indexing lecture videos for distance learning applications. By structuring video content, we can support both topic indexing and semantic querying of multimedia documents. In this paper, our aim is to link the discussion topics extracted from the electronic slides with their associated video and audio segments. Two major techniques in our proposed approach include video text analysis and speech recognition. Initially, a video is partitioned into shots based on slide transitions. For each shot, the embedded video texts are detected, reconstructed and segmented as high-resolution foreground texts for commercial OCR recognition. The recognized texts can then be matched with their associated slides for video indexing. Meanwhile, both phrases (title) and keywords (content) are also extracted from the electronic slides to spot the speech signals. The spotted phrases and keywords are further utilized as queries to retrieve the most similar slide for speech indexing. 1
DocMIR: An automatic document-based indexing system for meeting retrieval
This paper describes the DocMIR system which captures, analyzes and indexes automatically meetings, conferences, lectures, etc. by taking advantage of the documents projected (e.g. slideshows, budget tables, figures, etc.) during the events. For instance, the system can automatically apply the above-mentioned procedures to a lecture and automatically index the event according to the presented slides and their contents. For indexing, the system requires neither specific software installed on the presenter's computer nor any conscious intervention of the speaker throughout the presentation. The only material required by the system is the electronic presentation file of the speaker. Even if not provided, the system would temporally segment the presentation and offer a simple storyboard-like browsing interface. The system runs on several capture boxes connected to cameras and microphones that records events, synchronously. Once the recording is over, indexing is automatically performed by analyzing the content of the captured video containing projected documents and detects the scene changes, identifies the documents, computes their duration and extracts their textual content. Each of the captured images is identified from a repository containing all original electronic documents, captured audio-visual data and metadata created during post-production. The identification is based on documents' signatures, which hierarchically structure features from both layout structure and color distributions of the document images. Video segments are finally enriched with textual content of the identified original documents, which further facilitate the query and retrieval without using OCR. The signature-based indexing method proposed in this article is robust and works with low-resolution images and can be applied to several other applications including real-time document recognition, multimedia IR and augmented reality system
A user perspective of quality of service in m-commerce
This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2004 Springer VerlagIn an m-commerce setting, the underlying communication system will have to provide a Quality of Service (QoS) in the presence of two competing factorsânetwork bandwidth and, as the pressure to add value to the business-to-consumer (B2C) shopping experience by integrating multimedia applications grows, increasing data sizes. In this paper, developments in the area of QoS-dependent multimedia perceptual quality are reviewed and are integrated with recent work focusing on QoS for e-commerce. Based on previously identified user perceptual tolerance to varying multimedia QoS, we show that enhancing the m-commerce B2C user experience with multimedia, far from being an idealised scenario, is in fact feasible if perceptual considerations are employed
Information and Communication Technology Literacy among First-Year Honors and Non-Honors Students: An Assessment
Todayâs students should be able to retrieve and critically evaluate information from digital media; to organize, interpret, and apply the information; and to compose an effective presentation that responds to a clearly articulated research problem and communicates to a particular audience. These skills have been of special concern to the honors community, as evidenced by the 2009 JNCHC Forum on âHonors in the Digital Age.â Development of these twenty-first-century competencies, called information and communication technology (ICT) literacy, is the object of a curriculum enhancement project underway in the honors program, jointly with general education, at Louisiana Tech University. Recently, in the projectâs initial phase, an assessment of student performance was conducted using the Educational Testing Serviceâs (ETS) iSkills test. This article reports results which respond to the following questions: How ICT-literate are the universityâs freshmen? Do first-year honors students demonstrate greater proficiency in these skills than non-honors freshmen? How do Louisiana Techâs honors freshmen compare to those at other four-year colleges?
The Louisiana Tech University Honors Program has grown significantly in the last few years. The program currently counts between 460 and 480 students in its program, with a little more than half of those students majoring in science and engineering. Students are admitted to the program as freshmen if they meet one of two criteria: a 26 composite ACT score or a ranking in the top 10% of their graduating class. Our program is reworking its curriculum to place greater emphasis on undergraduate research, that is, to focus on the process of generating knowledge and to develop studentsâ college-level competencies in original inquiry, evidentiary analysis, critical use of information, and purposeful communication in writing or public presentation. The program is promoting information and communication technology literacy because the abilities to marshal and interpret sources in the digital environment of the twenty-first century are indispensable to undergraduate research, expected by institutions of higher learning, desired by employers, and required by accrediting agencies.
Funded by a Traditional Enhancement Program grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents Support Fund, principal investigator Brian Etheridge, Director of the Louisiana Tech Honors Program and Chair of the Universityâs General Education Requirements Committee, assisted by coprincipal investigator Boris Teske, College of Liberal Arts Liaison Librarian, administered the ETS iSkills test to a total of 97 freshmen and 73 juniors during fall quarter 2009. The object was to pilot a nationally renowned, standardized performance assessment to inform curriculum enhancement: to establish a baseline for cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis through repeated and multiple authentic assessments, such as the evaluation of portfolios; to identify practices proven to be effective; and to adapt and apply them to general education using the honors program as a âlaboratoryâ or test bed for curricular innovation
Toolkit for Implementation of Temporal Artery Thermometers for Neonates
Accurate temperature assessment is essential in neonatal patients and allows for prompt recognition of illness. Temperature can be measured by rectum, which is subject to injury, axillary, which is time-consuming, and temporal artery, which is safe and fast. The purpose of this evidence-based practice quality improvement project was to create an educational toolkit for nurses teaching temporal artery thermometers for routine temperature measurement on neonates, to establish the content validity of the toolkit, and to make recommendations for implementation of the toolkit. The format applied was the Kellogg Logic Model that proceeded from the assumption, to planned work, and results. The theoretical framework was Roger\u27s Diffusion of Innovations, which identifies champions as the initial change agents, helps engage the staff, and facilitates the change. The project consisted of a two-phase process. Phase 1 was the development of the toolkit contents by integrating the evidence and applying the framework in the context of working nurses. Phase 2 was the validation of the toolkit by expert nurses and educators with Item-CVI ranging from 0.80 to 1.00 and the scale-CVI at 0.98. The Toolkit for Implementation of Temporal Artery Thermometers for Neonates with three short video presentations was validated. The toolkit is shared on multiple webpages and is available to the public. Adopting the temporal artery thermometer for routine temperature measurement could be a new standard for temperature monitoring that is accurate and fast. Improved family satisfaction would result from a quicker temperature process and a less invasive method resulting in a more comfortable experience for their infant
Childrenâs Creativity Lab : creating a âpen of the futureâ
This work is funded by EPSRC and SICSA.Technology is changing the way we acquire new skills and proficiencies and handwriting is no exception to this. However, while some technological advancements exist in this area, the question of how we can digitally enhance the process of learning handwriting remains under-explored. Being immersed in this process on an everyday basis, we believe that school aged children can provide valuable ideas and insights into the design of future writing tools for learners developing their (hand)writing skills. As end-users of the proposed technology, we explore including children in a form of informed participatory design during a creativity lab where we invited 12 children, aged 11â12, to put themselves into the shoes of a product designers and create a Pen of the Future using prototyping materials. In this paper we describe our methodology and discuss the design ideas that children came up with and how these may inform the design of future writing tools.Postprin
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