Interface 1: The Class Web page
Give your opinions for the CS 6751 Fall 1996 class Web page.

I would like to first recognize and address the 'web page' paradigm which influences each of the interfaces that will be reviewed. It is rightly assumed that the reviewer is somewhat familiar with web browsers and navigation of web documents. In other words, we are all expected to be familiar with hyperlinks, plug-in technologies, and simple navigation. We may also note some of the limitations of HTML and web documents in general. For example, web pages are often reformatted in unwanted configurations when the shape or size of the browser window is modified.
Given these understandings, I'll move on to the reviews.

Interface 1 is a good example of a clean, well organized information source. It is concise, logically ordered, and consistently presented. It is relatively uncluttered and quick to load and navigate. Features that are especially useful:

1. Contact information
2. Review documents for exams and projects
3. Course organization and deadlines
4. Searching mechanisms for the lecture content

Criticisms:
1. "search on slides" is non-functional. Perhaps it was at some time in the past?
2. Homework column in syllabus table is unused.
3. Somewhat bland presentation. (Though the purpose and scope of the document does not demand flashy treatment)
4. No indication of document evolution nor modification. (Most likely the final exam questions were not posted the first day of class...)

Suggestions for improvement:
1. Add building floorplan links for office and classroom locations, also relating the building name and building number for those folks getting class locations from OSCAR.
2. Publications information should probably include ISBN numbers for completeness. ISBN's are becoming something of a URL for the publishing industry.
3. Add day of week information to the syllabus. It is sometimes helpful to have additional temporal cues when referencing past events.
4. Optional presentations of the syllabus - organized by readings, project milestones, homework assignments, etc. Another presentation might take an approach of quantifying course content and presenting each topic as it's own page with associated activities and assignments.
5. Add links to other relevant courses (even from other universities), pertinent research, outside texts, professional organizations, etc. This information could actually be a homework assignment to be compiled by students.
6. As mentioned above, I would recommend the integration of some sort of change history which notes when and how the information was changed, added or deleted.

Interface 2: Audio-enhanced class notes
The following is a lecture from the CS 6751 course in Fall 1996. Give your opinions on what is good and bad about this interface for accessing notes from a lecture.

This is the first time I've been exposed to the idea of class notes (in any form) being made available online. My enthusiasm waned though as I struggled to contextualize the whiteboard slides and audio. It seems to me that a visual presentation is much more important than I had, at first, believed - providing a much greater sense of context for the information. Beyond those initial frustrations though, I found the interface to be fairly straightforward and simple to operate.

Criticisms:
1. Access for the hearing impaired is limited. The addition of video would help alleviate this problem for those who read lips, though an automatically generated transcript would be most helpful.
2. Student questions are nearly undiscernible. Even the lecturers voice is difficult to follow - especially without any visual cues.
3. There is no temporal indication of when a sentence or stroke was performed on the whiteboard. More importantly, there is no indication of temporal order for the whiteboard content. (For example, what was written first, second, etc.)
4. Keyword field is unused.
5. No searching mechanism for locating keywords in the audio and slides.
6. There is no indication of temporal context for each slide or audio clip.

Suggestions for improvement:
1. Add streaming video to accompany the audio playback, along with closed captioning information. The closed captioning text can then be indexed both by content and by time so that a search function could be used to locate specific content, and begin playback at the appropriate time.
2. When playing back audio (and video in the future) show the point of playback in context of the entire lecture. Most of the AV streaming technologies provide a slider or cue position - that object could be located along a lecture timeline, with appropriate stop points (ala laserdisc chapter stop frames) for each of the various slides and content breaks.
3. Provide an interactive playback mechanism for the whiteboard text. Even better, link the pen strokes to the AV presentation.
4. Allow the whiteboard text to also serve as hyperlinks to other media sources (homework web pages for example).
5. Give more information about the audio start times by perhaps including the first sentence or two of the material that is being spoken. Also include information as to when the clip occurs within the scheme of the lecture.

Interface 3: More audio-enhanced class notes
The following is a lecture from the CS 3361 undergraduate Artificial Intelligence course in Spring 1997. Give your opinions on what is good and bad about this interface for accessing notes from a lecture.

This interface provides a step in the right direction when compared with #2. The inclusion of several temporal cues helps to define the lecture. Here again, though, a searching mechanism would be very helpful, along with a visual compliment. One question that keeps coming to mind is - how useful is all of this, given previous exposure. To help me out a bit, I had a look at the notes from our own recent lecture. We didn't cover a lot of "hard core" content in that lecture and so I'm still not certain that I've got a good feel for how I would personally use these offerings. For me it would seem like the purpose of these materials would be as a jumping off point to other related information. In other words, if I didn't understand a particular explanation upon first hearing - I may do a better job on a second go 'round. After that, I'll probably need to start looking for different explanation forms to help me grasp the concept. That's where I see the most potential for this interface - as a link to additional material and perhaps as a second chance at understanding.

Criticisms:
1. As before, the audio content is somewhat lacking, and would be greatly enhanced by the addition of video and full text.
2. There is no information which links specific pen action to a point on the timeline. In other words, we know when the pen was active, but we don't know what it was doing. Granted there are other ways within the system to determine that information, but it would be most helpful if it were offered directly.
3. In this particular example, the break in slide 13 is somewhat confusing. The timeline might be interpreted such that slide 14 might be more accurately called slide 13a - but when we visit slide 14, the content does not concur.

Suggestions for improvement: (Note: many of the suggestions pertinent to Interface #2 are also relevant here)
1. A scrub bar would be an interesting addition. The ability to listen to the content interactively as you moved back and forth along the timeline could provide another searching method.
2. Initially provide smaller slide thumbnails for quicker navigation.

Kevin C. Scott mail web
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