Rutgers, like most universities, is seeing an increasing and rapidly evolving use of videos, but at the same time increasing frustration with how difficult they are to use in an educational setting. The Libraries recently conducted a survey among Rutgers faculty to document the many ways video supports and enhances the education process. Rutgers faculty identified as a critical need the ability to easily create annotated clips. Noted one educator: "brief video clips engage students . . . who are constantly distracted by easily available activities and contacts via their handheld devices." Noted another, "I can't use precious classroom time to show long videos. " And another, "I'd love to know how to create a clip reel but have no idea where to go to find out." The RUanalytic, a new resource created by the Libraries, ably addresses this critical need.

The RUanalytic allows students and faculty members to create a playlist of video clips that can be annotated, analyzed, and published for use in research, dissertations, and instruction. The RUanalytic allows users to include annotations specific to each clip and clips from multiple videos.

The Libraries developed this tool after intensive design research for an NSF-funded mathematics education grant, in collaboration with the Rutgers Graduate School of Education. The grant involved making 400 hours of mathematics education videos available along with tools to support their use. The Libraries studied how researchers and graduate students analyzed the videos, as they looked for evidence of learning and progression in reasoning in students solving mathematics problems.

The RUanalytic is currently being used by mathematics education graduate students in the Graduate School of Education. The students are creating analyses for their dissertations, for peer reviewed articles, and for presentations on their research and also on the use of the analytic itself. One graduate student is using the analytic to improve the ability of working teachers to recognize student reasoning and has written an article about his methodology. To see an example, please click here. (hyperlinked to http://videomosaic.org/viewAnalytic?pid=rutgers-lib:36284)

The Libraries have expanded use of the RUanalytic to other video collections and courses. China Boom is a collection of 100 video interviews with Chinese business entrepreneurs discussing their business strategies and issues. A handful of interviews are in the Chinese language, and the Libraries are currently using the analytic to align the English transcript with the Chinese interview. Business faculty can use the tool to enable their students to analyze business trends and practices across interviews to look for commonalities and differences across business sectors.

The Equine Science Center collection is a collection of videos around a project to train rescued wild horses to integrate with domestic horses as working animals and pets. The faculty and students involved in this project study videos intensively to understand how and why different wild horse breeds and individuals react differently to training. They will be able to use the RUanalytic to document more fine- grained analyses of horse performance.

To find out more, visit RUCore http://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/ (under Collaborations, click on Video Mosaic Collaborative) or for more information contact Grace Agnew, Associate University Librarian for Digital Systems, at gagnew@rulmail.rutgers.edu.