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Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Volume Two - Academic Conferences

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Iain Stewart et al.<br />

The content should be personalisable by the student<br />

The content should be able to be added to either by staff or students.<br />

Ultimately the goal was to make better use of lectures and to embed them into an integrated<br />

framework of learning resources where the lecture content was just part of the overall package that<br />

would better support distance and asynchronous learning. From this specification a prototype was<br />

designed and implemented. The module that it was tested with was the same one as used for the<br />

previous prototype to allow for comparability of results from the previous version. <strong>Two</strong> topics were<br />

selected from the range of topics covered in the module.<br />

In each case, an integrated resource was provided which allowed the students to access the entire<br />

content via the blackboard VLE. The content was accessible using an iFrame within Blackboard to<br />

connect to an external server where the content was hosted. The reason for using this mechanism<br />

was to ensure that only students registered on the module were able to access the content and also<br />

to ensure that any copyright issues were dealt with according to the JISC guidelines for lecture<br />

capture (JISC Legal 2010) The prototype was built on a backbone of an XML structure. This allowed<br />

a schema to be quickly defined that identified all related materials, how they should be displayed to<br />

the student and at what point in time these assets are required. Synchronisation data between the<br />

captured video and presentation slides was also stored in this document, with each slide having<br />

start/end timestamps. The benefit of using XML was that it provided a framework that would allow the<br />

prototype to be hosted on a low cost infrastructure. This was to reduce operating costs which could be<br />

an issue with larger databases with complex relationships.<br />

The majority of the data processing and user interaction handling occurs on the client-side via<br />

JavaScript. This allows the XML documents stored on the server to be converted into JSON<br />

(JavaScript Object Notation) strings and then parsed efficiently on the client’s machine. JavaScript is<br />

also used to synchronise the video and presentation slides. This is done via timestamp information<br />

stored in XML documents which ensures that the content is synchronised. The prototype is shown in<br />

Figure 3.<br />

Figure 3: Blackboard screenshot showing the prototype running in the VLE – Note menus under<br />

presentations<br />

806

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