Principal Investigator: Brian Dorn
CoPrincipal Investigator(s): Larissa Schroeder, Kevin Ball
Organization: University of Nebraska at Omaha

Abstract:
The researchers on this project are developing and studying a web-based multi-media platform that will allow special-temporal annotations intended for collaboration in post-secondary courses. The use of digital web-hosted media is becoming increasingly commonplace and important in postsecondary educational environments. Instructors routinely post large collections of images, audio clips, and videos for student use. As instructors continue to adopt innovative pedagogies using these multi-media materials, the need to deliver multimedia content online, outside of the typical class setting, becomes even more important. Hybrid, distance learning, and massive open online courses place additional demands on the delivery of digitally-mediated content.

Current hosting solutions for the large amount of educational media lack tools to foster rich collaborative discourse and social learning. Student-to-student interactions that would be trivial in face-to-face settings are not easily reproduced in online environments. In part this is due to the lack of support for spatial-temporal collaboration within media playback systems. In order to address these limitations, this project explores the implementation of novel techniques to support spatial-temporal collaboration over a variety of web-hosted media including video, audio, and still images. The researchers will design, deploy, and evaluate TrACE – the Transformative Anchored Collaboration Environment.

The broader impact of the project lies in the potential transformation of how educational content is addressed in asynchronous environments – in particular massive open online courses (MOOCs). MOOCs have the promise of transforming undergraduate education making it available to traditionally underrepresented populations.