What I learned about Curation

In a recent blog post, http://johnmenken.blogspot.com/2017/01/using-xapi-to-roll-out-ms-office-365.html , I described how my group used xAPI to help rollout MS Office 365 in the organization. Part of that effort involved curating scores of youtube videos. This was my first practical example of curating large amounts of material as part of a larger project and a bit of an eye opener in some ways.

What we wanted

We knew that we wanted to put users in touch with videos as a means of learning MS Office 365 but we also felt it important to take care of these things:

• We wanted the videos to build from beginner to advanced
• We wanted to be comprehensive but not crazy. Thirty or so topics seems right, a hundred seemed excessive.
• We wanted to place numbers on each video link to signal moving up the scale of complexity. For example, a "MS Word 2016, Part 1, Getting Started" would obviously be beginner level and an "MS Word 2016, Part 33, Building an Index," would be advanced. Obviously what is beginner, intermediate, or advanced is a judgement call but we felt that we were up to that task.

In order to get a grasp in beginner, intermediate and advanced level topics we went into the help menu for each application. A couple clicks and a search or two gave us many topics to choose from for all levels. Now all we had to do was search youtube for videos that matched the desired content.

There are hundreds of MS Office 365 videos on youtube but of course they did not follow our numbering convention. Our “Part 9, Tables,” might be someone else’s “Part 16, Inserting a Table,” or maybe there was no "Part" at all. This means that the user would see a link entitled Part x but then after opening the video would see a title of something else. Ideally both titles would match but there wasn’t much we could do about that since editing the youtube video’s title was not in the cards. In the end, we felt that this title “juxtaposition” issue was something that the user could overcome and we chalked it up to "acceptable learner tension."

A minor annoyance is that the creators of the videos all feel a need to brand their videos a certain way. Often times this meant an animation or intro music to lead off the tutorial. Sometimes these intros were unbearably long. For the creators of the video this means a unique branding message, to us it meant more time away from the "target learning." There is a way to "jump in" to the portion of the video where the good stuff begins however the xAPI-youtube-wrapper that we were using to send LRS statements did not allow for this. This is just another thing that the user would have to "live with." One way that we dealt with this with a similar application was to place supplementary text next to the video stating words like, "Jump to the 1:12 mark in the video." Again, not ideal, but it was the best we could do.

As we curated the videos, we listed them in a word document. We listed its title, the youtube link, the embed code, and our description. This would all be used later as someone builds the html table of contents. Some of this information was passed as query string variables that helped "inform" the video-play page.

The finished result worked well and it saved the time and effort of creating the videos ourselves. In-house development never really made sense to us because of all the publicly available content.