Enabling Micro-Notes in Moodle for Educational Videos

Abstract

Micro-notes provide individual instructors with a simple, yet powerful mechanism to tailor educational videos to the needs of their own students. In this paper, we develop an easy-to-use, extension to Moodle (the popular and open-source Learning Management System), which permits instructors to create micro-notes for videos associated with their courses. These micro-notes can be viewed by students while watching videos online (via the Moodle platform), or can be downloaded along with videos for offline viewing (where they appear as sub-titles to videos). An instructor can also play videos with micro-notes in a classroom (blended learning). In this case, the video automatically pauses each time a micro-note is encountered. This permits the instructor to blend their own content into the video, and give students the opportunity to dwell on this additional material.