Instruments

The interface of the Web multimedia annotation system (Su et al. 2015) is shown in Fig. 1. There are two main functions in the system, namely the multimedia video function and the play bar function. The multimedia video function is designed to present one video at a time. The participants would use this function to play or pause the video. The play bar function includes a playing operation that can resume or pause the video. The video timeline could be given annotations at specific time points, and the volume operation could control the volume.

Schematic of the Web multimedia annotation system

Each added annotation is represented as a tag on the timeline. After editing the annotations for the video, the designer can publish the multimedia video with the annotations as an assignment for the users to watch. Users can view the video, use the play button, play bar, and volume button to control their multimedia video watching process, and also keep up with designers’ annotations. They can also add comment annotations to record their ideas and opinions to discuss the video content with peers. Finally, each multimedia video assignment provides a monitoring page in which several messages are presented, for example, who had or had not viewed the multimedia video, how many comments, discussions, and question annotations are created by a user, and how many questions a user has answered. The user can use this function to obtain the viewing status of each multimedia video assignment.

As shown in Fig. 2, the content of the multimedia video in this experiment is about how to use the Docker virtualization tools. The students were assumed to have not watched multimedia videos before they were published. To make it easy for users to understand the objective of the experimental activity, the instructor designed three multimedia videos of the experiment, namely, the concept of virtualization technology, the basic operation of Docker virtualization tools, skills and demonstration of practical development. The length of the multimedia videos was 943 s. The instructors uploaded the multimedia videos to the multimedia annotation system and added some question annotations in the multimedia videos, leading the users to complete the multimedia video assignments.

Viewing multimedia video assignments