VMCAnalytic: Developing a Collaborative Video Analysis Tool for Education Faculty and Practicing Educators Grace Agnew Chad M. Mills Carolyn A. Maher, Ph.D. Rutgers University Rutgers University Rutgers University gagnew@rci.rutgers.edu cmmills@rci.rutgers.edu carolyn.maher@gse.rutgers.edu Abstract This paper describes the genesis, design and prototype development of the VMCAnalytic, a repository-based video annotation and analysis tool for education. The VMCAnalytic is a flexible, extensible analytic tool that is unique in its integration into an open source repository architecture to transform a resource discovery environment into an interactive collaborative where practicing teachers and faculty researchers can analyze and annotate videos to support a range of needs from longitudinal research to improving individual teaching performance. This paper presents an overview of the design and functionality of the VMCAnalytic, which is a key component of the NSF-funded Video Mosaic Collaborative (VMC), together with a description of the underlying repository service architecture. The paper also describes the synergistic collaboration between digital library technologists and education researchers to build a research environment that can integrate with the VMCAnalytic tool to create a digital collaboration space. The prototype tool is available in as of January 2010 at the VMC website: www.video- mosaic.org . 1. Introduction In 2008, Rutgers University and the University of Wisconsin (Madison) received a National Science Foundation grant, Cyber-Enabled Design Research to Enhance Teachers' Critical Thinking Using a Major Video Collection on Children's Mathematical Reasoning. The grant is a collaboration among researchers at the Rutgers Robert B. Davis Institute of Learning, the University Wisconsin (Madison) Department of Educational Psychology, and the Rutgers University Libraries to develop the Video Mosaic Collaborative, an interactive research and teaching virtual environment where educators and researchers can utilize videos and digital tools to improve mathematics pedagogy [1]. The grant involves significant research and technical infrastructure components, but the heart of the grant is the goal to make the Robert B. Davis Institute of Learning (RBDIL) mathematics education video collection permanently accessible and actively used by researchers, teacher educators, and both pre- service and in-service teachers. The RBDIL collection contains more than 4000 hours of mathematics education interventions, conducted in a variety of mainly New Jersey school settings, over a twenty-year period, in many cases following the same student cohorts from elementary school through high school. The video interventions employ a variety of tools and techniques, with a strong focus on evidence of student reasoning and learning and student-centered teaching techniques for mathematics content areas such as fractions, counting and combinatorics, probability and calculus. Preserving these videos and making them accessible for future generations of researchers required something more than a digitization strategy and a website. It required a repository strategy where tools for managing and preserving resources are integrated with web-based strategies for making the videos accessible to users. Videos that are preserved but not used are a critical waste of resources and effort. Thus another primary goal of the grant is to create a collaborative digital space where the RBDIL videos can be effectively utilized. A major innovation of the project is leveraging the different strengths of digital library professionals and mathematics education faculty to create a synergistic collaborative design that significantly benefits both domain specialists and by extension creates a collaborative environment that reflects the best practices in both professions, for the lasting benefit of the education community. The VMCAnalytic tool is a critical component of the VMC. It leverages the repository architecture to enable researchers and educators to collaborate in the use and analysis of videos and also to benefit future researchers by creating durable analytics that are information objects and also rich metadata about the digital videos, enabling researchers and busy educators alike to