A Visual Comparison interface for educational videos

With the increased use of videos as learning support tools, learners of all levels regularly seek and view educational videos, whether to gain a basic understanding of a topic or to delve deeply into a specific domain subject. The availability of tools to help learners make informed choices would be of great value. These tools should support searching videos that match the learner’s needs and provide comparisons between them. Our contribution in this respect is the design of an innovative framework aimed to support video comparison using criteria that include the topic relevance in the video, its depth of coverage, and the required prerequisites for video comprehension, other than features including the explanation duration and the percentage of frames containing slides. All these features are extracted from the video and used to provide the user with video-specific and comparative visual information. Our preliminary results about the comprehensibility, perceived usefulness, and usability of the comparison interface are highly encouraging. In particular, we highlight the positive perception of users about the possibility of better understanding which videos address the concepts they are looking for and identifying the prerequisite concepts needed to comprehend the video topics.