zmWmQs

A Platform that Integrates Quizzes into Videos
Robin Woll, Sven Buschbeck, Tino Steffens, Pascal Berrang, Jörn Loviscach
Observations Made During the Beta
Test
The platform is currently used for 89 Khan-style videos
(heavily edited to remove slips of the tongue, mistakes,
repetitions and pauses; total playing time: 8.5 hours) with
450 embedded quizzes, to be found under www.capira.
de. This content formed the basis of a remedial course
in mathematics for approximately 350 stu-dents at the
last author’s institution. The course was conducted in
flipped-classroom style (Loviscach, 2013) with face-toface
sessions of at most 15 participants working with a
student tutor. The course was offered on different parallel
schedules: two weeks with three hours of daily face-toface
time (Monday through Friday) or four weeks with 1.5
hours of daily face-to-face time.
The Google AppEngine smoothly served every traffic
spike (we saw a maximum of eight requests per second)
without any noticeable increase in the latency of requests.
We expect the AppEngine to work smoothly with a much
higher traffic load.
When we interviewed the students about their experience
after two weeks of using our system, the majority
con-firmed that the embedded quizzes helped them to
stay focused while watching the videos. The quizzes may
feel annoying at times; however, questions that occur naturally
within a video - such as asking about the result of an
algebraic transformation currently being applied - were
received well.
Almost all of the students watched the videos with embedded
quizzes on our platform rather than without quizzes
on YouTube, even though we have pointed them to
both sources. Those students who used YouTube direct-ly
were mostly confined to a smartphone. About 5% of the
students complained about our lack of support for mobile
devices. This percentage is comparable to the current
(end of 2013) percentage of views of the last au-thor’s
YouTube videos on smartphones (8%) and tablets (6%).
In an anonymous survey among the students, three
quarters of the participants said they watched more than
half of the videos; almost the same number said they did
not skip more than half of the quizzes in the videos they
watched. Only 5% of the participants reported to have
only watched up to one quarter of the videos, but 20% indicated
the same level of use for the quizzes in the videos
they watched. We found a correlation between the reported
percentage of use of the quizzes and the students’
appraisal of the difficulty of the problem sets handed out
to do in the face-to-face sessions: Students who experienced
these problems as easy took virtually all of the
embedded quizzes; students who reported the difficulty
of these problems to be appropriate or difficult took far
fewer embedded quizzes.
In an open-ended part of our interviews, the majority of
the students told us they like learning by teaching and encouraged
us to build in features to support this in further
versions.
Open Questions
How can we get more quizzes into the videos
We learned that the efficiency of the author’s workflow
is crucial. Equipping the videos of the remedial mathe-matics
course with five to ten quizzes each, required about 70
hours of work. This is still too much for our target of one
quiz every 30 seconds at a cost that is manageable for a
small institution. Hence, our next development cycle will
focus on lecture recording and quiz authoring in front of a
live audience, on further increasing the editor’s efficiency,
and on enabling crowed-sourced quiz authoring. The latter
requires a user-role system, a version manager, and a
workflow for quality assurance, similar to the system employed
by Wikipedia.
What is the right web development framework for our
purposes
There are literally hundreds of other web development
frameworks, ranging from Adobe AIR to Microsoft ASP.
Since our core team was already experienced in building
large-scale applications in GWT and we wanted to implement
our proof-of-concept quickly, we did not focus on
finding the “best” framework for our purposes. For our
next version we are currently pursuing deeper research
in particular on dart lang and AngularJS since they are
strongly supported by Google (which indicates a minimum
degree of longevity), support more modern features
like data binding and web components, and in total get
along with much less development overhead.
How can we integrate aspects of gamification in a
meaningful fashion
We are currently supporting some simple aspects of
gamification. For instance, the quizzes are timed, to further
focus the user’s attention. Gamification, however,
has much more depth and breadth (and comes with a load
of issues as well). In terms of content, for instance, it is important
to steer on a fine line between too easy and too
stressful, that is: to be challenging but not too much. In
terms of support by the platform one may think of dif-ferent
ways of showing his or her progress to the learner in
a playful way. Here, we are researching ways to mo-tivate
learners but not demotivate them (think about the effects
of bad grades in school.) Another central area of gamification
is when to give which kind of reward. Our platform
includes (simple as this may be) “optimistic” sounds for
correct responses, but this may only be the start. In any
case, we want to make sure that the detri-mental effects
of such external motivation are kept under control.
Research Track |158