JISC

Access the Synote Mobile site

View the example of Tim Berners-Lee's video podcast 'The next Web of open, linked data'

Project Aim

Synote Mobile will meet the important user need to make web-based OER recordings easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for learners, teachers and others.

Project Background

Synote has won many awards and been used by students throughout the world to learn interactively from educational and lecture recordings. Dr Wald has made all his Synote recordings available as OER and Synote itself is a very valuable OER being Open Source and freely available and facilitating the repurposing of anyone’s OER recordings.

Virtually all UK students now carry mobile devices capable of replaying video and want to use them for learning. However the majority of these devices cannot replay Synote’s accessible, searchable, annotated recordings. Synote was designed for use only with computers because in 2008 few students had phones or tablets capable of replaying Internet video.

Dr Wald has presented and published internationally since 2008 about his innovative module on assistive technologies and universal design which is freely available and includes hundreds of Synote recordings by many international experts linked to associated online materials.

Project Methodology

This project will create a new mobile HTML5 version of Synote able to replay Synote recordings on any student’s mobile device capable of connecting to the Internet. The use of HTML5 will overcome the need to develop multiple device-specific applications. The original version of Synote displays the recording, transcript, notes and slide images in four different panels which uses too much screen area for a small mobile device. Synote Mobile will therefore be designed to display captions and notes and images simultaneously ‘over’ the video. Where necessary existing Synote recordings will be converted into an appropriate format to be played by the HTML5 player. Success will be demonstrated by tests and student evaluations using Synote recordings on their mobile devices. Synote Mobile will enable all students to work together on their coursework, projects and revision in more modern flexible environments than desktop computer rooms not designed for collaborative working. Students could for example collaboratively review and amend Synote recordings and synchronised notes using their phones as well as creating and recording group audio and video presentations annotated with transcripts, indexes and notes.

Project Documents

• Synote Mobile Project Final Report (Word) - the Final Report has been compiled from project blog posts