Using Videos in WHSC Library eLearning Projects

Gonghua Liu, 
Instructional Designer & technologist
Woodruff Health Sciences Center, Emory University
United States
gliu2@emory.edu

Sandra Franklin, 
Director
Woodruff Health Sciences Center, Emory University
United States
librsf@emory.edu

Kimberly Powell, 
Life Sciences Informationist
Woodruff Health Sciences Center, Emory University
United States
krpowel@emory.edu

Mia White, 
Medical Education & Technologies Informationist
Woodruff Health Sciences Center, Emory University
United States
mia.s.white@emory.edu

Abstract: The six-year long WHSC Library eLearning initiative has been a successful collective work of informationists and the multimedia developer. All informationists in the WHSC Library have been taking the responsibility of content developers, identifying eLearning needs, proposing potential projects, analyzing the target audience, implementing instructional design strategies, advising the relevant form of the eLearning modules, writing up scripts, proofreading content material and also providing recorded voice saved into digital files for some of eLearning modules. The humble start of the eLearning modules were merely webpages with only text and images. As more modules developed, the need for more variety of media became apparent. Images, animation, audio and even video have been integrated into WHSC library eLearning modules to fill the needs from the audience who are expecting media-rich learning materials.

Background

The six-year long WHSC Library eLearning initiative has been a successful collective work of informationists and the multimedia developer. All informationists in the WHSC Library have been taking the responsibility of content developers, identifying eLearning needs, proposing potential projects, analyzing the target audience, implementing instructional design strategies, advising the relevant form of the eLearning modules, writing up scripts, proofreading content material and also providing recorded voice saved into digital files for some of eLearning modules. The humble start of the eLearning modules were merely webpages with only text and images. As more modules developed, the need for more variety of media became apparent. Images, animation, audio and even video have been integrated into WHSC library eLearning modules to fill the needs from the audience who are expecting media-rich learning materials. 
Among all media types at WHSC Library eLearning group’s disposal, video is popular with the audience and heavily utilized in eLearning modules of variety of subjects; however, video is relatively difficult to create and, in comparison with other media types, video requires a certain level of technical expertise for editing and manipulation. The article lists a few examples of video used in different modules at WHSC Library, discusses the relationship between art and technical issues and, finally, describes briefly how the modules are developed.

Popular media: video

Presentational video

Video captured with digital camcorder is called "Presentational video." In the eLearning Solutions page, under the Medical Education tab, there’s a list of eLearning titles. These are the digital video clips added to eLearning section in the form of video presentations. The module about the 2011 Orientation contains the recording of a few presentations made by an informationist at WHSC Library and other two Emory students. A couple of video clips are recorded interviews. The topic was explaining the model for providing service to clinicians and medical trainees at Emory Hospital. The videos enabled the audience to hear and see the impressions of a clinician and a medical trainee without their having to be physically at the presentation. Although these modules are not used for training purposes, but they are effective in presenting information that can be viewed with vivid sound and images.
Camtasia video

“Camtasia Video” is a multimedia presentation created with Camtasia Studio for educational purposes. A typical eLearning module in Camtasia Video format consists of text, image, audio, animation and the finished product is saved as a digital video file.  A couple of factors are considered to decide whether this format is used or not: subject matter and the length of the content. Good candidates for this format include those modules with smaller content size and the subject matter such as teaching a process, showing something on the screen, describing something visually, using visual elements to explain concepts.

Screencast video

A new use of video for eLearning, screencast, was recently proposed and implemented by one of our informationists. “Screencast video” is created by Jing, a screen capture tool also from TeckSmith. Camtasia Studio has a steep learning curve while Jing is simple and intuitive, very easy to learn. Without media editing features, Jing, relying images or video captured directly from the screen, creates screencasts for tutorials and training materials.

Flash video

Flash videos are created by Flash professional, a heavy duty authoring tool to create image, animation, animation with interactive features and the end products can be saved different formats. Unlike other video applications as stand-alone modules, Flash video is embedded into eLearning modules as animated callout, highlighting the messages of importance in the page.

Art and Science

Using media in eLearning product development involves art as well as technologies. To create functional and effective eLearning modules, the artistic creativity and knowledge about the properties of the media being used are essential.
Art can be for art's sake, as some people believe. However, in the realm of education, art can be, if appropriately incorporated into the learning material, art can be an effective tool for communicating meaning and enhancing learning; learners become more focused and process content differently. Therefore, the success of an eLearning product needs, first of all, a solid content but also the well-integrated artistic elements. The design and implementation of artistic elements are not only for a look and feel, but also help the learners to gain more information that they cannot grasp simply from the text. In fact, taking video for example, the media itself contains content in the form of audio and moving images; in this case, without media and without art, there is no content.
The process of integrating art in eLearning materials starts with content, messages being communicated to the audience. Thorough understanding of the content is critical to make correct artistic design decisions. 
Videos are used in multiple types of eLearning modules and they are infused with the elements of art in one way or another. Presentational video does not need artistic effort directly since the images of video are not created but captured with a device. However, the quality of a captured video can be influenced by the way how the video is captured. A videographer with extensive technical knowledge can shoot excellent footage, but this doesn't mean that she can make a movie with great "taste."  Factors such as lighting, background, speaker's voice and body language may subtly project artistic effects, adding value to the quality of presentational video in the eLearning module.
In contrast with presentational video, Camtasia video is relatively art "rich." In Camtasia Studio, an eLearning piece can be created solely using images, video clips and animated objects captured on the computer screen. However, with an impressive set of editing tools, a dazzling multimedia show can be conjured up for educational purpose without using a single media element captured from the computer screen. For Camtasia video, a number of artistic design decisions have to be made before “pouring the content” into the piece. For example, a color scheme is created to reflect WHSC Library branding and maintain visual consistency among all eLearning products. A feasible layout is worked out that defines the relationship among different media objects on the “stage,” producing a unique "look and feel" that promotes clarity of the information presented and facilitates communicating important messages. 
Design principles or rules are necessary in creating art that pleases the audience and this part of video, as a media, is related our heart, capable of passion, imagination, originality and creativity; On the other hand, the media involves a host of technical issues that make development hard or even impossible. This issue is related to our brain. To benefit from the versatile features offered by video, facing and conquering the learning curve is inevitable. While it’s not practical for us to acquire the level of knowledge and skills equivalent to what an engineer or mathematician are capable of, some basic understanding about the media is helpful for our projects.
Of four types of video used for our eLearning modules, only presentational video needs hardware for capturing video. Disregarding shooting technics, a few things may affect the quality of the video captured by the camcorder: hardware such as lens, CCD, and the resolution of the capture device. Using a consumer-level HD camcorder, decent quality video can be captured. In Adobe Premiere Elements, a lightweight video editing software for hobbyists, imported footage can be edited and saved in a format suitable for our application.
Just like a still image, the video image is formed with pixels. A video image has a size defined by its width and height. A 640 x 480 video image consists of 640 pixels along the top or the bottom of the image and 480 video pixels along the left or right side of the image. Video is a time-based media, playing multiple images at a unit of time and the video image is called “frame.” The number of frames shown at a specific time unit is called “frame rate” or frames per second (fps). There are a few standard frame rates such as 60, 30, 24 fps used by digital camcorders. Video produced with high frame rate looks smooth and realistic when it plays; video with low frame rate look jerky and incoherent when it plays. The presentational videos, used in our eLearning section, plays smoothly and shows vibrant colors, because the video is converted from HD footage, shot with high frame rate. On the other hand, screencast video, when played, looks choppy because the software captures video on the computer screen at a much lower frame rate, 10 frames per second. The default frame rate for Flash video, used as animated callout, is 24 fps. The frame rate can be set higher if playback is priority or set lower if file size is a concern more important.
A color image looks better than a gray-scale image. A clip of movie trailer in color is more attractive than a black-white one. The beautiful colors in digital image or video are coded with digital information. Each pixel can be “colored” digitally by a fixed number of bits. To obtain more subtle variations of colors, more digital information is needed. The term “color depth” is used to define how many different colors each pixel can display. One bit displays black and white, 8-bit displays 256 colors, 16-bit displays thousands of colors and 24-bit displays millions of colors. All videos used in the eLearning modules support 24-bit color, displaying brilliant and realistic images in color.
Factors such as high frame rate, attractive color and bigger display size combined together, makes a high-quality video ideal for eLearning applications. But it comes with a cost, the tremendous file size. The better quality we want, the more digital data is needed. Large file size makes it difficult to transfer and play on the Internet. To maintain desired quality and reduce the data size, different methods of compression are used. For example, the original video clips shot for presentational video play smoothly in the media player on the local computer but it won’t play well at a slow internet connection. When these files are converted into a different format, with amount of compression, the file size becomes many times smaller and plays well on the web.
Videos are used for augmenting content with artistic effect and the visual quality of the media plays an import role to achieve that goal. In the process of module development, technical problems are unavoidable. With some level of technical knowledge picked up along the way, we are able to acquire video with hardware, edit footage in a video-editing software, reduce a file size using a specific codec and save a file in a right format recognized by a player.

Development

Presentational video

Depending on the type of eLearning module, video can be acquired in different ways. For the presentational video, a video camcorder is needed and some basic cinematic knowledge is helpful. To get the high quality footage, use the correct settings of the camcorder and pay close attention to the shooting techniques such as light, angle and framing. The recorded digital video is saved, in AVCHD file format for high-definition video and the file is based on the MPEG 4 codec. To play the file on the computer, we converted it into a more popular mpg format. Using Adobe Premiere Elements, we dissect the video into shorter sections, reducing file size for quicker upload. 
Placing video directly in a webpage can be tricky. There are a few HTML tags, such as <embed>, <object> and <video>, can be used to play video clips in the webpage but there are problems about browser support, incompatible video formats and the presence of Flash or QuickTime. There’s an easy way to put video on the web: we could upload all our videos to Youtube and then embed those videos into our webpage with generated HTML code. This is an extremely simple process, but some of the videos, created in Camtasia, come with some auxiliary files for interactive features and they are not allowed to be uploaded. In addition, we have to deal with an external host, inviting more potential complications.
The situation leads us to abandon the method of manually writing code to deploy the video in the webpage. Taking advantage of the media-inserting function in Dreamweaver, we are able to place the video file in the webpage without writing a single line of code. The original file has already converted into FLV file format, which is one of the two formats supported by Dreamweaver. 
The whole process of video placement is easily done with a few mouse clicks but the system has generated dozens of lines of code in the webpage. The <object> tag is used for embedding the video in the page and there are many <param> tags, defining parameters for plugins embedded with the <object> tag. Video placement in the page is possible with lines of code in the webpage as well as a few supporting files generated during the inserting video process.

Camtasia video

Camtasia Studio, a sophisticated authoring tool, creates Camtasia video. Unlike presentational video, directly shot from a scene, Camtasia video is created, from scratch, a multimedia presentation and saved in a video format. The process of creating a Camtasia video is not that different from creating a movie: the project starts with a well-written script developed by our informationists, followed by a storyboard created by the multimedia developer based on the script. The script is the original content and the storyboard can be thought as an adapted version of the content. Once the storyboard is finished, it’s time for “lights, camera and action.” Instead of the presenters or interviewees appearing in presentational video, various multimedia elements, from different sources, are positioned on the Canvas where the show takes place. 
Camtasia video is audio driven: the entire video follows a narration based on the written script and the appearance and behavior of all media elements on the Canvas is determined by the recorded narration. Textual information does appear on the Canvas, but in the form of summary phrases and bulleted text. The pithy sentences summarize main ideas appear on the Canvas while the corresponding part of audio is played. Bulleted texts are generously used for the viewers to quickly scan the content along with images and animated objects. Aesthetics can be considered when using text, but it is more important for the viewer to read for the meaning of the text. Colors with right contrast are used for clarity. 
Plethora of features provided by Camtasia Studio makes it easy for the developer to create and edit multimedia elements within the software. Layout can be applied to objects on a two-dimensional surface. Thanks to timeline tracks, media elements can be created and added into a third dimension. An example of “3D” layout would be a graphic image placed in the back and a line of text overlaid onto the image. The text contains the main message while showing an image in the background projecting a sort of secondary message. 
The finished Camtasia video can be saved in multiple formats such as WMV, MOV, AVI and even GIF. Some of these files do not display in the browser; all these files are simply bare-bone video without any interactive features. Only MP4 format guarantees the video placement and interactive features. Again generated supporting files should be well organized into sub-folders for video playback correctly.

Screencast video

Jing, an intuitive freeware, is used to create screencasts, short video clips mainly for showing a process on the screen. The development of a screencast is less “labor intensive” and straightforward because, instead of creating media elements from scratch, media elements used as content are directly captured from the screen, saving much time otherwise to be used for extensive media creation and editing. The process of making a screencast is relatively simple, consisting of a few steps: Identifying the interested objects or area on the computer screen, selecting a capturing method, capturing the interested objects or area on the screen and save the captured data in the video format provided by the screencast tool.
The seemingly simple process of making a screencast can be deceiving. In fact, to make this type of short video interesting to watch, effective in communicating information, lots of efforts are needed. Depending on the purpose of screencast, a script, even if it’s a simple one, decides the quality of the project. For example, to create a screencast for showing the user how to convert a file format into another, the script should list, in right order, all steps required by the operation. During the process, some concepts should be explained so as to let the user understand why a particular step is taken. A picture is probably worth of thousand words, but with well-synchronized voiceover, the message from the screencast will be received quicker and understood better.
A screencast without audio is hard for the audience to follow and understand. WHSC Library eLearning screencast module is driven by recorded voice. Familiar with content and experienced with Jing, the media developer can be narrating, instructing what and explaining why, while working through the process to be taught for learners. To avoid heavy editing, both audio files and captured images, it is a good idea to record scripts first and then record the screen actions based on the content and pace of recorded voice. 
The finished video is saved in SWF file and can be converted into other formats and edited in video editing applications. The video is meant for quick, a relatively low level visual communication media; the format is hard-coded at 10 frames per second. 

Flash video

Objects such as all types of callout and imported images can be animated in Camtasia, adding enough drama to make the content more interesting. But the basic functionalities provided for animating objects in Camtasia cannot be compared with Flash Professional in any way. With ActionScript, an object-oriented computer language, highly interactive animation project can be made; without coding, sophisticated animation can also be done in the timeline. Multiple ways are available for creating animation such classic tween, motion tween and shape tween. 
In Adobe Flash Professional, using classic tween method, a number of animations are created and placed in the pages of some eLearning modules, dabbed as “Interactive Primers.” To create a classic tween animation, simply set a starting point, a key-frame, in the timeline and place an object where the key-frame is. Then, set another point, which, again, is another key-frame. Now, make some kind of change such as moving the object to a different location. The system records the change and when you play the animation, the object movies from A to B. This is a very simple example that illustrates the essence of animation.  
The SWF file format is different from other video formats in the group because it contains animated vector graphics and it may also contains programs with different degrees of interactive functions. So, the SWF file may not be opened as a video stream container when it contains applets. 

Conclusion

Video is an exciting media type that can entertain, inform and educate. Playing an important role as versatile media type, video can be used to deliver recorded content such as an orientation speech or information gathering interview that can be viewed online. Camtasia Studio, can create a multimedia presentation in the format of video, with certain degree of JavaScript support, providing some useful interactive features. The video created from Jing shows the audience mostly, other than other applications, how to accomplish a task on a computer. The SWF file, generated from Flash Professional, is used as an animated call-out, adding some zing to the otherwise relatively boring webpage. The presence of video in eLearning modules not only infuses esthetics into the content but also add functionalities that improve communication. With more technical knowledge gained and creativity unlocked, more innovative ways of using video for eLearning are promising.

References

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