Collaboration and Education Group

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Collaboration and Education Group

• Jonathan Grudin
• Microsoft Research
• jgrudin_at_microsoft.com

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Collaboration and Education Group

• Formed about 12 months ago
• Mission
• To explore novel technologies and applications
  that enhance collaboration and education /
  training
• Current work focuses on streaming media
• Research model
• Evaluation Laboratory and Field Studies

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Technology and Education

• Two broad facets
• Technology for improved content
• deep models of subject matter and student
• active exploration of subject (simulations)
• relate to students context/environment (situated
  learning)
• MOSTLY DOMAIN DEPENDENT
• Technology infrastructure for
• course and student management
• content creation
• delivery / distribution
• collaboration
• MOSTLY DOMAIN INDEPENDENT
• Both aspects are important and complementary

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Technology Adoption Phases

• Phase-1
• digital version of non-digital process
• Phase-2
• value-added features appear in digital version
• Phase-3
• process and technology re-design

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Why Consider Multimedia?

• Network, processor, memory capability changing
  quickly
• Reasoning about exponential growth
• Simultaneous emergence of live and on-demand
  capability
• Shift in the definition of scholarship

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Ongoing Projects

• MSTE and MURL Online Seminars
• Time Compression, Skimming, Indexing, Browsing
• MRAS Multimedia Annotations and Authoring
• Flatland Telepresentations

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MSTE Presentations

• Logs of 10,000 sessions by over 2000 users
• Some results
• On-demand audience about 40 of live audience
• 60 lt 5 minutes
• Viewers jump around video
• Initial portions much more likely to be watched
• Presentations will be designed differently in
  future
• Present key messages early in talk
• Present key messages early in slide
• Use meaningful slide titles
• Reveal talk structure in slide titles
• Consider post-processing talk for on-line viewers

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Analysis of Online Presentation Viewing

• Logs of 10,000 sessions by over 2000 users
• Some results
• On-demand audience about 40 of live audience
• 60 lt 5 minutes
• Viewers jump around video
• Initial portions much more likely to be watched
• Presentations will be designed differently in
  future
• Present key messages early in talk
• Present key messages early in slide
• Use meaningful slide titles
• Reveal talk structure in slide titles
• Consider post-processing talk for on-line viewers

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Ongoing Projects

• MSTE and MURL Online Seminars
• Time Compression, Skimming, Indexing, Browsing
• MRAS Multimedia Annotations and Authoring
• Flatland Telepresentations

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Time Compression, Skimming, Indexing

• While text documents are easy to skim, that is
  not true for audio-video
• Ability to skim can be a key advantage of
  web-video
• time-compression up to 2-fold nothing thrown
  away
• skimming gt 2-fold some content thrown away
• indexing adding navigable structure
• Also useful in live broadcast scenarios
• e.g., late joiners can catch up to live talk

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Time Compression Synchronized Audio and Video

• To preserve pitch throw away portion of each
  100ms chunk, then stitch together
• Basic signal processing well known, but several
  systems issues
• Results of lab studies
• People choose 1.4 speed, dont adjust much
• They like it
• I think it will become a necessity Once people
  have experienced it they will never want to go
  back. Makes viewing long videos much, much
  easier.
• Comprehension may go up

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Time-Compression Demo
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Skimming Compression Goes Nonlinear

• To beat 2x speedup, must throw away content
• Sources of information
• audio pauses, intonation, speech-to-text and NLP
• video scene changes
• other slide-changes, previous viewers patterns
• Lab studies of 4x-5x speedup
• Viewers learn from automatic summaries
• Viewers like and learn more when author-edited
• Perception of quality increases over time
• Mixed-initiative summarization is promising

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Indexing

• Vanilla video provides no structure for
  navigation
• Indexing provides navigable structure examples
• textual table of contents (slide titles)
• video shots / scenes
• speech-to-text gt NLP gt topic detection

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Ongoing Projects

• MSTE and MURL Online Seminars
• Time Compression, Skimming, Indexing, Browsing
• MRAS Multimedia Annotations and Authoring
• Flatland Telepresentations

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Multimedia / Temporal Annotations

• Motivating scenarios
• a virtual university
• all students are remote, asynchronously watching
  lecture videos
• a standard university
• making better use of in-class time
• Temporal annotations
• annotations associated with streaming media
• each annotation is linked to the media time-line
• annotations stored separately from the media files

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• Ability to annotate can add significant value
• shared notes for asynchronous collaboration
• question-answers linked to a streaming-video
  lecture
• archived feedback for the instructor
• personal notes on audio-video found on the web
• personal/shared table of contents summarizations
• annotations may be computer generated
• use speech-to-text providing search and seek
  ability
• captured strokes from electronic white-board
• captured questions, slide-flips, from live
  broadcast
• ...

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Results from Preliminary User Studies

• Personal note-taking study (MRAS vs. Paper)
• similar of notes (1 / minute)
• positioning none in paper 10-15s later in MRAS
• all subjects preferred MRAS (although more time),
  and thought more useful for future reference
• Shared notes study
• text preferred to audio
• 14/18 stated more participation than in live
  session
• auto-tracking particularly useful

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Currrent Work

• MSTE class to use MRAS and recorded lectures
• Can we increase instructor productivity?
• Can we emulate live-classroom discussion /
  community formation in an asynchronous
  environment using MRAS?

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Ongoing Projects

• MSTE and MURL Online Seminars
• Time Compression, Skimming, Indexing, Browsing
• MRAS Multimedia Annotations and Authoring
• Flatland Telepresentations

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Flatland Tele-presentation System

• Joint project with the Virtual Worlds Group
• Flexible architecture for distributed
  collaborative applications
• Target scenarios
• presentations to remote audience
• online conferences
• distributed tutored-video-instruction
• ...

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The Flatland Project
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Do We Need to Sacrifice Quality?

• The goal is to improve it
• Stanford Tutored Video Instruction (TVI)
• Process
• video tapes of un-rehearsed live lectures
• small group of students watch along with a
  para-professional tutor
• Results from 1978-86
• All MSEE 1800 students, avg. GPA 3.40
• TVI-MSEE 89 students, avg. GPA 3.62
• Similar observations recently for D-TVI version

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Stanford TVI Experiments 10/73 - 3/74

• remote TVI students with tutor do best
• it helped at-risk students even more
• Source J.F. Gibbons, et al. Science, Vol. 195,
  No. 4283, 18 March 1977

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Flatland Experiences

• Initial use in 3 multi-session MSTE classes
• Presentations from desktop to remote audience
• Students
• Liked the convenience
• Liked ability to multitask
• Did not think learning suffered
• Instructors
• Missed familiar sources of feedback
• Comfort level rose over time for 2 of 3
• Overall Lack of awareness of others a key
  problem

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Issues Being Explored

• Creating presence and awareness
• representing attendees gaze activity level ...
• Providing for interactivity protocols for online
  talks
• types of widgets floor control multiple back
  channels
• Complexity of interface for speaker / audience
• use of channels over time different physical
  contexts
• Capture and replay of tele-presentations
• capture all activity time-compression
  annotations

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Activity Surrounding Teaching/Learning

• Pre-authoring
• Slides, web notes, reference material, exercises,
  
• Content delivery
• Synchronous delivery to local/remote audience
• Archived for on-demand audience and review
• On-demand access by students
• Watch content personal notes TOC index
• Discussion around content
• Synchronous small group one-on-one
• Asynchronous
• Post-lecture work by instructor / tutor
• Answer questions discussions feedback
  redesign
• Student evaluation

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Concluding Remarks

• Key drivers of change
• market needs
• technology
• Key new directions
• learner-centric
• asynchronous small-group synchronous
• Key challenges
• concrete studies to indicate effectiveness
• technology/products taking value beyond cost
• business model and bootstrapping issues

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For More Information

• http//www.research.microsoft.com

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Watching Behavior Within a Session
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