Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Iain Stewart et al.
entry per student was recorded. The option of making more detailed comments was also made
available
The survey is still open at time of writing but at present there are 18 full responses from a pool of 44
The key points from the feedback were that the students liked the access to the resources in the
integrated framework but that there were areas where it needed improvement, particularly those of
the presentation framework and the “conversation tools”. It was also recognised by the staff that while
the XML based approach for the content management was acceptable for the first prototype, it lacked
flexibility and required a certain level of skill to use and so a more sophisticated back end system
would need to be developed.
The prototype was tested across a range of platforms and feedback from the students confirmed that
it worked well across a range of PCs and Apple laptops and desktops running a wide range of
browsers. The choice of Flash as a video format and with the other content based on XML, meant that
the content was accessible from any standards compliant browser on these platforms. There were no
issues with these devices presenting the content.
While it was not the primary aim of the prototype to target handheld devices, the interface was
designed to support this form of access. The prototype has run successfully on many high end
smartphones. Figure 5 shows the application running on a Samsung Nexus S Android reference
smartphone. The decision to use Flash as a video playback standard prevents iOS devices from
being able to access the full content. To address this, the video source on the next version will
perform device detection and feed the appropriate format to the device. In addition, the future
development will include dedicated “Apps” for mobile platforms which will support offline access to
prevent high data charges.
Figure 5: The application running on an Android mobile platform
5. Design of the next stage
While the students liked the prototype and found it useful, their feedback raised several points about
the usability of the prototype. The ability to navigate to the relevant part of the content directly from
questions and from other content elements was appreciated but the need to move up and down the
screen to see the different elements needed to be improved. This will be addressed by converting the
layout of the student view to be menu driven for the text based content (eg tutorial questions) which
will ensure that the active element of the content is always directly under the presentation area.
There was an assumption that students would use the video as the prime navigation tool when
viewing the lecture. This was not always the case and so the ability to navigate by slide as well as by
video will be added.
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