At OCWC2014, Joscha Jaeger and Olivier Aubert presented a first version of the ABSORBED web application, which stands for Annotating By Synchronizing Open Resources Boosting Educational Discussion, result of a collaboration between the OpenHypervideo project and the COCo project.

A wealth of Open Educational Resources is now available, and beyond the first and evident problem of finding them, the issue of articulating a set of resources is arising. When using audiovisual resources, among different possibilities, annotating a video resource with additional resources linked to specific fragments can constitute one of the articulation modalities. Annotating a video is a complex task, and in a pedagogical context, intermediary activities should be proposed in order to mitigate this complexity.

The ABSORBED tool is dedicated to supporting video annotation activities. It aims at improving learner engagement, by having students be more active when watching videos by offering a progressive annotation process, first by only synchronizing predefined resources (provided by the teacher), then more freely, to accompany users in the practice of annotating videos. The synchronized resources, constituting annotations, produced by each student can then be centralized by the teacher for discussion and defining a group consensus of the best way to annotate the video.

The initial version is can be experimented online. Get in touch with us if you would be interested by using this tool.