To critically review the use of screencasts for teaching land surveying

Screencasting tools allow for a screen capture of the actions on a computer screen with accompanying audio. This research initially reviews through the literature how screencasting has been used pedagogically and, through this primary research, the application of an existing screencast called Screencast-O-Matic and feedback from students from both Construction Management and Geospatial Surveying Undergraduate Programmes of TU Dublin, where and how it could be deployed for the surveying classes and fieldwork during the pandemic situation. This research occurred when all Irish third-level institutions lectures and tutorials moved online, and access to survey equipment for fieldwork was severely reduced. The paper concludes with a reflection on how some of the practices put in place due to the current pandemic situation would benefit when face to face classes resume. During surveying projects, several steps were identified during which students encountered a bottleneck in their learning. As screencasts provide unsupervised access to teaching materials, a series of screencasts was created as online support and incorporated into our VLE (Virtual Learning Environment); this included video tutorials on how to set up and use surveying equipment, as well as screencasts showing how to process and perform calculations of recorded survey data. Results from students being subsequently surveyed through an online questionnaire showed that the vast majority found the videos helpful or very helpful in explaining how much they knew or did not know about the material and liked the format as a complement to the weekly recorded lectures. The survey also revealed a variety of learning habits and styles within the class. Those findings are consistent with previous research, which highlight that screencasting facilitates learning for the diversity of learners. Veedbacks, or video feedback, provided students feedback on various assignments, such as fieldwork projects and online examinations. A series of semi-structured interviews revealed that students found the veedbacks a valuable complement to the feedback process by better understanding how they could improve their subsequent assignments. Grades for both undergraduate classes were compared with those from previous pre-Covid classes, with a significantly higher mark for students who used screencasts as an online tool. Moreover, several students surveyed suggested that screencast videos, particularly those involving calculations, should be incorporated as online support when face-to-face classes resume. Based on these findings and their own experience in creating screencasts, lecturers in this study believe that screencasting provides a means to build support material relatively quickly for feedback, tutorials and teaching material and is a helpful complement to both online and face to face classes. Keywords: online teaching, screencast, feedback, geospatial surveying, collaborativ

Building cognitive bridges in mathematics: Exploring the role of screencasting in scaffolding flexible learning and engagement

Conceptual learning in mathematics can be made more accessible with mathscasts, which are dynamic, digitally recorded playbacks of worked examples and mathematical problem-solving on a computer screen, accompanied by audio narration. Mathscasts aim to enable students to develop deeper understanding of key foundational concepts in order to equip them to undertake degrees in Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Previous research has indicated the success of maths screencasts to provide explanations of complex concepts and reinforcement of concepts previously learnt. The project presented here extends current research by demonstrating the value of visual, interactive screencasts for learning of mathematics, and investigates students’ perceptions. A survey of student use of screencasts identifies learners’ usage patterns, the significance of offering mathematics support via mathscasts in flexible mode, and students’ integration of mathscasts into their study strategies. The results show positive implications for the integration of multimodal learning resources in STEM environments

A taxonomy of video lecture styles

Many educational organizations are employing instructional video in their pedagogy, but there is limited understanding of the possible presentation styles. In practice, the presentation style of video lectures ranges from a direct recording of classroom teaching with a stationary camera and screencasts with voice-over, up to highly elaborate video post-production. Previous work evaluated the effectiveness of several presentation styles, but there has not been any consistent taxonomy, which would have made comparisons and meta-analyses possible. In this article, we surveyed the research literature and we examined contemporary video-based courses, which have been produced by diverse educational organizations and teachers across various academic disciplines. We organized video lectures in two dimensions according to the level of human presence and according to the type of instructional media. In addition to organizing existing video lectures in a comprehensive way, the proposed taxonomy offers a design space that facilitates the choice of a suitable presentation style, as well as the preparation of new ones.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure

Mining and linking crowd-based software engineering how-to screencasts

In recent years, crowd-based content in the form of screencast videos has gained in popularity among software engineers. Screencasts are viewed and created for different purposes, such as a learning aid, being part of a software project’s documentation, or as a general knowledge sharing resource. For organizations to remain competitive in attracting and retaining their workforce, they must adapt to these technological and social changes in software engineering practices. In this thesis, we propose a novel methodology for mining and integrating crowd-based multi- media content in existing workflows to help provide software engineers of different levels of experience and roles access to a documentation they are familiar with or prefer. As a result, we first aim to gain insights on how a user’s background and the task to be performed influence the use of certain documentation media. We focus on tutorial screencasts to identify their important information sources and provide insights on their usage, advantages, and disadvantages from a practitioner’s perspective. To that end, we conduct a survey of software engineers. We discuss how software engineers benefit from screencasts as well as challenges they face in using screencasts as project documentation. Our survey results revealed that screencasts and question and answers sites are among the most popular crowd-based information sources used by software engineers. Also, the level of experience and the role or reason for resorting to a documentation source affects the types of documentation used by software engineers. The results of our survey support our motivation in this thesis and show that for screencasts, high quality content and a narrator are very important components for users. Unfortunately, the binary format of videos makes analyzing video content difficult. As a result, dissecting and filtering multimedia information based on its relevance to a given project is an inherently difficult task. Therefore, it is necessary to provide automated approaches for mining and linking this crowd-based multimedia documentation to their relevant software artifacts. In this thesis, we apply LDA-based (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) mining approaches that take as input a set of screencast artifacts, such as GUI (Graphical User Interface) text (labels) and spoken words, to perform information extraction and, therefore, increase the availability of both textual and multimedia documentation for various stakeholders of a software product. For example, this allows screencasts to be linked to other software artifacts such as source code to help software developers/maintainers have access to the implementation details of an application feature. We also present applications of our proposed methodology that include: 1) an LDA-based mining approach that extracts use case scenarios in text format from screencasts, 2) an LDA-based approach that links screencasts to their relevant artifacts (e.g., source code), and 3) a Semantic Web-based approach to establish direct links between vulnerability exploitation screencasts and their relevant vulnerability descriptions in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and indirectly link screencasts to their relevant Maven dependencies. To evaluate the applicability of the proposed approach, we report on empirical case studies conducted on existing screencasts that describe different use case scenarios of the WordPress and Firefox open source applications or vulnerability exploitation scenarios

The blended professional : Jack of all trades, and master of some?

Within the last decade we have experienced an unprecedented growth in the use of technology in education. The adoption of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) for many universities has been widespread. Granted the speed of which this has been integrated is influenced by local policy, the academics themselves and the support available to learn how to use the VLE and its suite of tools. However, there has been a shift from just having a small central eLearning team who reached out to encourage staff to use the VLE, to a growing need for a wider pool of people to support colleagues who want to learn why and how technology can be used to enhance their teaching practice. Today the VLE is just one aspect; mobile learning and educational Apps, social media, and webinars are just some of the many examples being used to develop communication, collaboration and social learning. Some institutions (or indeed faculties within them) have looked to create roles for Learning Technologists to support such development, and yet others have relied on the early adopters and enthusiasts to assume this role. This chapter will look at some short case studies and reflections of the ‘blended professionals’ who are advocates of #EdTech and how the need to wear different hats to meet very different objectives can present surprising results when supported within a community of practice

Recognizing and understanding user behaviors from screencasts

User interacts with computers or mobile devices, leading to user behaviors on screen. In the context of software engineering, analyzing user behavior enables many applications such as intelligent bug fix, code completion and knowledge recommendation for developers. Such technique can be extended to more general knowledge worker environment, in which users have to manipulate devices according to specific guidelines. Existing works rely heavily on software instrumentation to obtain user actions from operation systems, which is hard to deploy and maintain. In addition, considering the security and privacy of some scenarios, non-intrusive is the major requirement to be included in the system. In this work, we leverage Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing techniques to recognize and understand user behaviors from screencasts, which is a non-intrusive and cross-platform method. We first recognize 10 categories of low level user actions such as mouse moving and type text, then summarize them to higher level abstractions (i.e. line-granularity coding steps). We also try to interpret user interaction with applications by multi-task learning and generate structured language descriptions (i.e. command, widget and location). Finally, unsupervised learning method is introduced for GUI linting problem, which is taken as a case study of user behavior analysis. To train the deep neural networks, we collect diverse video data from YouTube, Twitch and Bugzilla, and manually label them to build the dataset. The experiment results demonstrate the high performance of proposed method, and the user study validate the practical applications of many downstream tasks

CIRT Newsletter--January 2013

This issue contains the following articles: Faculty Spotlight: Establishing Community in an Online Course with Social Media Distance Learning Strategic Plan Upcoming Events Digital Thinking: Screen Recording Best Practices Online: Managing Multiple Sections in a Single Blackboard Course Blackboard News: Catalyst Awards and May Upgrade Blackboard Support for Students - New Resource App Review: Index Cards News from ITS: Accessing ITS Services Remotely New in CIRT: New Faces and New Process for Narrated PowerPoint

E-learning in higher education: designing for diversity

"This research was conducted to compare methods of e-learning accessibility evaluation that may be applied in a higher education context. Results of ""objective"" accessibility evaluation of e-learning technologies using automated tools were compared to results of ""subjective"" accessibility evaluation with student participants. It was found that objective and subjective accessibility evaluation of e-learning technologies both yield useful, albeit different, information. To further explore subjective accessibility evaluation, results and student perceptions were compared following moderated and unmoderated testing sessions. Neither the efficiency of completing tasks in a sample online course nor the number of accessibility problems detected were deemed significantly affected by the format of the testing session. However, most students preferred to participate in an unmoderated testing session where they felt less self-conscious and as though they could interact more naturally with the technology. Findings from this study point to the importance of considering not only objective accessibility evaluation and accessibility guideline conformance as measures of the accessibility of e-learning technologies, but also the subjective experiences of students as they engage with the technologies. There is also value in taking a holistic approach towards evaluating e-learning accessibility by considering the accessibility of learning outcomes (factoring in the learning context to the evaluation) in addition to the accessibility of individual e-learning technologies. Because accessibility is a variable that is important to all students, and not just students with disabilities, it is critical that institutions of higher education work with a variety of stakeholders to determine not only how best to evaluate e-learning accessibility, but also how to ensure that the results of accessibility evaluation are widely disseminated in a manner that is likely to have a broad impact on enhancing e-learning accessibility for diverse student populations.