Lecture and individual podcasts are today widely used but the systems are mainly optimized for lecture recording as scenario and do not support other settings sufficiently. This project will develop a strongly automated and flexible video recording and visualization system with a tight access control that covers educational scenarios based on individual training sessions.

Initial Situation

There is a great variety of uses of video technology for educational purposes. One important domain is the individual training and assessment of skills, such as communication skills in medical education, teaching skills in pedagogical education or physical skills in sports. Video recordings of these training sessions help to enhance their didactic efficacy by

• allowing students to analyze their own performance, but also by
• facilitating the feedback from tutors and peers.

This promotes essential meta skills such as self-reflection and self-assessment.
In medical education, the training of communication skills has become increasingly important over the past years. A common training method is to record and analyze interview situations with simulated patients. Since these recordings contain potentially very personal material access control is very important.
A further increase in the number of training sessions is currently limited by their costs (technical infrastructure) and high demand of human resources (technical assistants). It is impossible to handle a large amount of video material (ca. 1000 hours at UNIBE) without automating the workflow, from the recording to the publishing of the video with the corresponding access rights.

Goals

The goal is to develop a workflow and a technical solution, based on the SWITCHcast system, that

1. supports the recording of large numbers of training sessions with as little use of human resources as possible, and
2. that allows to automatically publish these videos giving access only to authorized persons.

The system we plan to develop will have the following features:

• strict assignment of the ownership of the video (by binding the student to be recorded to the video, using an AAI login)
• easy handling of the recording sessions by students or other lay persons
• different work-flows depending on the institutional context (local encoding of the video before upload to reduce the workload on the SWITCHcast server, or upload of the raw video file to the SWITCHcast server for encoding)
• alternative upload mechanisms (automatic or manual upload of the video and its associated meta-data) with subsequent automatic online publishing and setting of the corresponding access rights
• flexible mechanisms for setting the access rights (for example based on membership to a learning group, and individual invitations sent to peers and tutors)

The envisioned technical solution for such a system consists of the Learning Management System (LMS) of the institution and the SWITCHcast system. During the project the LMS ILIAS (plugin will be developed) and Moodle will be considered.

Benefits

The new workflow and recorder software will offer the opportunity to record a big number of individual training sessions at the partner institutions and other Higher Education Institutions in Switzerland, and help institutions to keep the recording costs in line with their budget.
Students will profit by the recorder system since this type of teaching approach, based on individual training sessions and their reflective analysis, is not only used in undergraduate medical education, but also in postgraduate medical education, in the education of other health professions (such as nursing or physiotherapy) and teachers, and many other areas. Therefore, the development will be of great importance to many other educational settings and institutions.

Development

At the technical level three major elements can be distinguished, which are extensions to existing technologies:

1. Extension of the recorder capabilities: AAI login, branding videos with the video owner (AAI unique id), local encoding followed by automated upload, possibility to record simultaneously with two different cameras
2. Extension of the SWITCHcast-ILIAS interface (SWITCHcast API): upload videos and their associated metadata to the SWITCHcast Server, allow the LMS to retrieve from the SWITCHcast Server all videos with a particular Ivtproject-Id, Owner-Id, etc.
3. Extension of the ILIAS internal SWITCHcast handling: initiate and terminate iVT projects, assign roles, provide access control, provide functionality to invite viewers to your videos, visualize the videos that are hosted on the SWITCHcast server.

As first step recording technology will be evaluated and compared (SWITCHcast, thir party software) and minimum hardware requirements will be defined.
Depending on the decision (new recorder, third party software, hybrid) the detailed software specification will be defined.
As third an extended SWITCHcast API will be developed for automated upload of videos and metadata and the access control. The handling and evaluation of the access rights is entirely delegated to the LMS.
Then the ILIAS-plugin for access control and visualization of videos in LMS will be produced (based on existing plugin).
Finally the system will be tested, adapted and implemented.