The Weiner Lecture Archives: An Ontology-Driven Interface for Viewing Synchronized Lectures and Notes

摘要

For several years, the lectures in our introductory Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) courses have been videotaped and webcast, mainly as an aid to students with time conflicts that prevent them from attending class. We present the Weiner Lecture Archives - a project to identify, archive, filter, and make available the best of these lectures with their notes on the web. We provide a hierarchical, ontology-driven interface to entire courses, which allows users to choose any topic and/or subtopic to view, from a small snippet of one lecture to one that spans many lectures. Once the topic is chosen, our system launches RealPlayer to play the lecture video in one window while showing synchronized lecture notes or slides in another window. By the spring of 2007, we had finished encoding our department's entire four-course introductory sequence into this system. Student and worldwide use was greater than 100,000 views last year alone, direct feedback has been encouraging, and we hope to expand to other EECS courses in the future.