Synote: Important Enhancements to Learning with Recorded Lectures

Abstract

Abstract-This paper explains three new important enhancements to Synote, the freely available, award winning, open source, web based application that makes web hosted recordings easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for learners, teachers and other users. Synote uniquely achieves this through the creation of synchronized notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions, enabling users to easily find, or associate their notes or resources with, any part of a recording available on the web. Students surveyed would like to be able to access all their lectures through Synote. The facility to convert and import narrated PowerPoint PPTX files means that teachers can capture their lectures without requiring institution-wide expensive lecture capture systems. Crowdsourcing correction of speech recognition errors allows for sustainable captioning of the lecture while the development of an integrated mobile speech recognition application enables synchronized live verbal contributions from the class to also be captured through captions.

Innovation in the undergraduate microelectronics programmes at the University of Southampton

“…Furthermore, software and equipment for recording lectures is provided in all lecture theatres at UoS, as well as in the ECS laboratories. This year, UoS will be rolling out the Synote software [5], which has been developed in ECS to automatically generate searchable subtitles for recorded lectures and enable the crowd-sourced correction of any errors that result from this process. Furthermore, the ECS website and internet are powered by linked data, which ensures that all module web pages are automatically updated whenever their syllabuses are updated [6].…”

LeCTo: A rich lecture capture solution

“…Today there are various commercial and free lecture capture systems available focusing on different aspects of lecture capturing process: some focus on simplifying the recording process [7], [8], or automatizing camera control during recording [9], [10], some attempt to improve lecture reproduction properties by allowing the consumer to focus and manage only target region of interest in the lecture video [11] or by improving synchronization mechanisms [12], while some systems focus on hosting and indexing of lecture capture materials [13].…”