VMCAnalytic: Developing a Collaborative Video Analysis Tool for Education Faculty and Practicing Educators

This paper describes the genesis, design and prototype development of the VMCAnalytic, a repository-based video annotation and analysis tool for education. The VMCAnalytic is a flexible, extensible analytic tool that is unique in its integration into an open source repository architecture to transform a resource discovery environment into an interactive collaborative where practicing teachers and faculty researchers can analyze and annotate videos to support a range of needs from longitudinal research to improving individual teaching performance. This paper presents an overview of the design and functionality of the VMCAnalytic, which is a key component of the NSF-funded Video Mosaic Collaborative (VMC), together with a description of the underlying repository service architecture. The paper also describes the synergistic collaboration between digital library technologists and education researchers to build a research environment that can integrate with the VMCAnalytic tool to create a digital collaboration space. The prototype tool is available in as of January 2010 at the VMC website: www.video-mosaic.org.