[Air-L] Video research into classroom use of collaborative VR/virtual worlds - Coding procedure and employing a research assistant

[Lee, Mark]

Dear all, 

My colleagues and I are looking to employ a research assistant to conduct some analysis of video that has been gathered as part of classroom trials of a collaborative VR educational game. In particular, we have several hours’ worth of footage of the physical classroom during the course of the activity, as well as of the virtual environment from the teacher’s point of view. We would like to analyze that data and also correlate it with log-file (and possibly also additional video recordings) of student actions/interactions that took place in-world, with a view to better understanding the collaborative processes and outcomes arising from the activity across both within and across the physical and virtual modalities.

In terms of the level of coding detail, in addition to spoken dialogue (in the classroom—there was no in-world voice), I would also like to capture simple body language: namely gestures, body positioning/orientation, and gaze. There are no facial expressions involved as the participants were all wearing head-mounted VR devices that obscured their faces; however, the game was responsive to where their head was facing, and they had motion controllers that allowed their hand gestures (e.g., pointing, waving at other avatars) to be represented in-world.

If you have experience with this type of research, I would greatly appreciate your insight into the following:

1. How do you typically go about coding the video data? Do you transcribe the data into textual form for coding, or do you use a software package allowing you to directly mark up/annotate the video timeline? I have seen both approaches used, but would like to get a sense of which is more common/preferred.

2. Given the desired level of coding detail as described above, what would be your estimation in terms of the number of hours it would take a graduate student or other research assistant to code each hour of video footage (counting the contemporaneous classroom and in-world footage separately)?

3. Do you know of a graduate student or other similarly qualified individual who has experience with this type of task, and who might be interested in this as a (paid) opportunity?

Many thanks in advance!

Kind regards,


Mark


Mark J. W. Lee
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Education, Charles Sturt University, Australia
Visiting Faculty, Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Email: malee[at]csu[dot]edu[dot]au