Technologies and Techniques for Supporting Facilitated Video

Worldwide, demand for education of all kinds is increasing beyond the capacity to provide it. One approach that shows potential for addressing this demand is facilitated video. In facilitated video, an educator is recorded teaching, and that video is sent to a remote site where it is shown to students by a facilitator who creates interaction around the video materials. This interaction is vital to the success of facilitated video, however very little work has explored how to support the facilitator in creating this interaction. This is the focus of the work presented in this dissertation, done in the context of a facilitated video deployment between UW and China, and Digital Green, an NGO using facilitated video for agricultural education in rural India. In this dissertation we will discuss work that we have done to understand the factors that affect the success of a deployment, and what kinds of support can be useful to the facilitator. Based upon our findings, we have developed and field tested two different technical solutions for delivering support to the facilitator in real time during the video shows. The primary difference between the two was the mechanism used to synchronize the video with a handheld device, allowing the user to interact with the device as an extension of the presentation system (e.g. TV/DVD player). One approach involves audio codes embedded in the video that were decoded on an Android smart phone using digital signal processing. The other approach was a custom-hardware "smart" remote control. We field tested both devices for four weeks with Digital Green facilitators. In this dissertation, we present our work in supporting the facilitator, including investigatory field work, software development, and pilot deployment.