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Contents
• Chapter 1 • Chapter
2 • Chapter 3 •
Chapter 4 • Chapter
5 • References
Advances in technology may be sudden and swift. In the last decade alone there have been at least five different generations of technology and software. The rate and pace of change make it difficult for instructional technologists and teachers to effectively assess the merits and value of a particular technology before it is hurried into use. Of all the applications available on the World Wide Web (Web), streaming video may have the most apparent promise for instruction as an augmentation to existing multimedia applications. However, its sudden appearance and short period of use have yet to reveal any research about its applications and potential for instruction.
Streaming video<> can be operationally defined as video that is transmitted in a continuous data stream over the Internet to an appropriate Web browser playback program for immediate display. Before the introduction of streaming technologies, video files delivered over the Internet had to finish downloading before they could be viewed. Since most video files are quite large in size, watching video over the Internet was a long, slow process. Streaming video allows a user to begin watching a video file almost as soon as the video data arrives at the Web browser (Waggoner, 2000).
Streaming video is a fairly new technology, so most Web-based instruction has been composed of textual content, still or simple animated images, and some form of class communication (Belanger & Jordan, 2000). Streaming video now seems to be growing in popularity and a number of institutions are experimenting with its application. Streaming video in its various forms is being used for everything from recruitment, to entertainment, to instruction. The cost associated with streaming video has fallen from thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars, as can be found in consumer electronics store advertisements. However, there is a paucity of literature on streaming video and its effectiveness in Web-based instruction.
One of the attributes of streaming video is its ability to be delivered across a low-bandwidth Internet connection, such as a home computer analog modem connection. Such delivery, however, means that the original video must be heavily compressed, and the resulting streamed video lacks the resolution, frame rate, and overall quality of the source video. This raises the question, therefore, of whether or not the technical attributes of streaming video affect learning. It may be that streaming video has limitations due to the technical restrictions, or perhaps it may be best suited for some kinds of instructional tasks and not others.
Placing streaming video on the Web is now fairly easy and inexpensive. The manufacturers of streaming video products have made great strides in quality and utility. Although streaming video may not immediately approach TV-quality over an analog dial-up connection, many distance education programs and educational institutions will attempt to incorporate streaming video into their arsenal of Web tools. Many projects have already examined the effectiveness of Web-based instruction (Jung & Rha, 2000). Therefore, research into the effectiveness of streaming video in Web-based instruction needs to occur now, rather than later.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of streaming video in Web-based instruction as an augmentation to text and image based Web-based instruction in a higher education class. Specifically, this study looked at the following factors as measures of the effectiveness of streaming video:
1. Beliefs about the use and perceived effectiveness of streaming video in a Web-based learning environment
2. Achievement scores of groups either viewing or not viewing streaming video
3. Demographics: gender, age, academic college, location of Internet access, either home or campus computer lab, and prior experience with the Web
The research questions posed by this study were as follows:
1. Will the use of streaming video in Web-based instruction produce significant differences in achievement<> scores among groups either viewing or not viewing streaming videos?
2. Do demographic characteristics lead to significantly different beliefs about the use and perceived effectiveness of streaming video in Web-based instruction?
3. Do demographic characteristics relate to differences in achievement?
4. Are there characteristics of streaming video in a Web-based instructional environment that lead to beliefs about the effectiveness of streaming video in a Web-based instructional environment?
The technology involved in streaming video is becoming ever easier to implement and more affordable for educational uses. While the growth of previous video-based technologies in education were rapid, the growth of the use of streaming video is likely to mirror the speed of the growth of the rest of the Web. As more educational institutions acquire the capability to stream videos over the Internet, the effectiveness of streaming video in learning environments will be questioned. Institutions that seek to insure pedagogically sound instruction will want to justify the use of streaming video, to understand its potential uses, and to understand its limitations.
Assumptions associated with this research project are that all students who participated had access to the Web and to the tools required to access the study material. Another assumption is that students honestly answered belief and demographic questions and submitted their own work without benefit of outside assistance. Further assumptions are that the participants were representative of students at the University of Montevallo, and that they were representative of the student population with access to Web-based instructional tools at the postsecondary level.
This research project is subject to a number of known limitations. One limitation is that the study only included students from a single institution in the southeastern region of the United States. Another limitation is that the location and type of computer used by each subject to participate in this study was uncontrolled. This potentially biased beliefs about the effectiveness of streaming video due to the possibility of different computers displaying the content of the study differently from what the researcher intended. Data transmission over the Internet, which is out of the control of the researcher due to the existing design and infrastructure of the Internet itself, may have introduced unintended biases.
The choice of software used to stream video for this study is another limitation. Each of the three main software methods for streaming video, QuickTime, RealVideo, and Windows Media, has strengths and weaknesses that may have biased the results. Additionally, the streaming video used in the study was to be displayed on the subject’s screen at a predetermined size, which, combined with the uncontrolled type of computer used by the subjects and differences in video display due to the nature of data transmission over the Internet, might have caused differences in the appearance of the streaming video. Finally, demographic and belief data were gathered by Web-based survey forms, which might have exposed the study to possible violations of the previous assumptions.
Streaming video: This is video that is transmitted in a continuous data stream over the Internet to an appropriate Web browser playback program for immediate display.
World-Wide Web: The technology that allows documents and other content to be downloaded and displayed on a user’s computer in a consistent manner, using advanced search, linking and navigation so that users can view and interact with content, data and media in a non-linear manner.
Compression: A method used to enable large amounts of data to be efficiently transmitted from one location to another using minimum or available bandwidth. Video, such as displayed on a normal television set, consists of a large amount of data, which would make transmission over the Web impractical. Video that is streamed over the Web has been heavily compressed, often by over a 100:1 ratio.
Internet: This is an umbrella name given to network of computers that includes technology such as the Web, E-mail, File Transfer Protocol, and streaming video.
Online: A term meaning to be connected to and using the Internet, including e-mail, Web, and other applications.
Web-based instruction: Also called online instruction, this is instruction delivered primarily over the Internet using browser technology to display content and manage course functions, such as evaluation and learning. Web-based instruction may take the form of brief tutorials or entire courses.
Hyperlink: A hyperlink is typically a word, phrase, or image. Selection of the hyperlink is accomplished by means of a mouse click, which then directs the user’s Web browser to load and display content from a different source on the Internet.
This research project will be presented as a dissertation in five chapters. The research topic, the significance and purpose of this study, and the specific research questions to be addressed are introduced in Chapter I. This chapter also addresses key assumptions and limitations of the research design, and defines terms used throughout the report. Chapter II comprises a review of literature that contributes to the existing knowledge base related to the research topic. Chapter III describes the research method, including the survey instrument and data analysis procedures. The results of the research study are presented in Chapter IV. Chapter V completes the dissertation with a summary of the problem, an interpretation of the results, and implications arising from the findings.
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