Enhancing Video Lectures with Digital Footnotes

This paper describes an ongoing research project to develop micro-notes: digital footnotes created by a community of instructors and learners to enhance the utility of educational videos. Specifically, we demonstrate that a suitably motivated group of undergraduates were able to create over 1,400 annotations for over 30 hours of video lectures in just ten days. Furthermore, over 57% of these micro-notes were rated by at least two peers in two more days. The quality of these micro-notes was manually assessed in two ways: (1) an independent group of undergraduates evaluated a large sample (35%) of micro-notes that had been peer-rated above average by the original group, and (2) the author, who was also the instructor for a similar course, evaluated a smaller sample of the top 6% of peer-rated notes. Our results indicate that peer-ratings are a useful (but not infallible) indication of the quality of micro-notes, and can be used to effectively generate useful annotations of video lectures for beginner students.