The FAU Video Lecture Browser system

A growing number of universities and other educational institutions provide recordings of lectures and seminars as an additional resource to the students. In contrast to educational films that are scripted, directed and often shot by film professionals, these plain recordings are typically not post-processed in an editorial sense. Thus, the videos often contain longer periods of inactivity or silence, unnecessary repetitions, or corrections of prior mistakes. This paper describes the FAU Video Lecture Browser system, a web-based platform for the interactive assessment of video lectures, that helps to close the gap between a plain recording and a useful e-learning resource by displaying automatically extracted and ranked key phrases on an augmented time line based on stream graphs. In a pilot study, users of the interface were able to complete a topic localization task about 29 % faster than users provided with the video only while achieving about the same accuracy. The user interactions can be logged on the server to collect data to evaluate the quality of the phrases and rankings, and to train systems that produce customized phrase rankings.