Presentation on Integrating technology into Swiss Vocational education - Professor Alberto Cattaneo

Last evening, we had the privilege of attending a presentation from Professor Alberto Cattaneo from the Swiss Federation University of Vocational Education and Training on various technology-enhanced learning projects carried out over the last 15 years.

The presentation came through connections made with  Professor Antje Barabasch, who is head of research at SFUVET and is currently on sabbatical in Aotearoa NZ, hosted by the University of Canterbury. 

Professor Cattaneo provided a overview of the Swiss 'dual system' and then detailed some of the projects. More detailed information is available in the recently published book on 'Educational Technologies for Vocational Training: Experience as Digital Clay'. In the decade and a half since the SFUVET began their work, they have progressed from static to moving multimedia (videos) and now work extensively in MR including AR and VR. Of note is their use of multimedia to engage learners and to use the records to nudge learners into reflective practice. Examples shown and discussed across the presentation provide us with affirmation of the work we have undertaken so far and goals to aspire to into the future. 

coaches' eye - use in improving vocational education

We have been using coaches eye successfully (the Ipad App) for several years with hospitality students. Mainly for the improvement of skills and dispositional learning as students learn how to check in and check out guests.

This semester, we are trying coaches' eye app on surface pro tablets, with nursing students and office systems students. Nursing students to learn how to communicate with patients and other health staff using 'health' discipline protocols and office systems students learning how to chair meetings.

We have found coaches' eye to be better for skills learning rather than to improve communication skills requiring ongoing conversation.

Coaches' eye works best when there is not too much talking, and feedback is mainly on 'action'. In hospitality, the check-in / check-out process includes 'in-built' pauses in the conversational flow between receptionist and guests, allowing for aural feedback to be provided between students' activity. However, when there is a constant stream of conversation, it is much more difficult to provide oral feedback, as the oral feedback voices over the conversation between student and role play conversationalist. The pause button can be used to stop the video and offer feedback. However, there is a break in continuity in the learners' conversation and this lowers impact. Additionally, the role plays in nursing and office systems are quite long. Again, it becomes difficult to sustain attention when there are too many pauses in the feedback on a role play.

We are now working on focusing on key aspects of the role play. i e. what is the skill being practiced for each role play. Tutors then hone in on the key aspects and offer feedback only on key aspects. Meanwhile, I return to evaluating other possible video annotation tools, starting by a refreshment of work from several years back from two blogs in 2009, one on video analysis vs video annotation, the other on video analysis for multimodal discourse analysis.

Alternatives to Coaches Eye - video analysis app

We have been using Coaches’ Eye for a range of ‘skills improvement using videos’ projects. However, coaches’ eye apps struggles to run on the surface RT. Video annotation and playback is 'jerky' due to the surface RT's low spec processor.

Appcrawler offers a range of alternatives to coaches' eye. A comparative analysis of 3 apps - ubersense (ios and android), coaches' eye and dartfish - reveals coaches' eye as the only app available on Windows devices. There are more alternatives with regards to PC apps.Some of the examples looked at in previous post could be used, but apps rather than full blown PC software would be less memory hungry. MotionPro is a newer example, but at $100 plus, a bit expensive and we will also need Surface Pros to run the app.

So will still need to keep an eye for a suitable alternative. 

Using video to help students' reflective learning process

As a follow up from our net tablet project, I have just started on another Ako Aotearoa Southern Hub funded project with Hospitality tutors Debbie Taylor and Heather McEwan. Two sub-projects using tablets (ipad2s and Toshiba Thrives) will be worked through. The first one is for students to use the ipad2s to video each other as they role play front office customer interactions. The second is to explore the concept of virtual field trips to replace hotel visits (as all the high end hotels in Christchurch are not inaccessible due to the 2011 earthquakes).


The first project, using the ipads to video student role plays has just started. Debbie and I are piloting this with a group of 1st year Diploma in Hospitality students. Our first hurdle was a technical one. How to attach ipads to a datashow so that Debbie could use the student videos as examples to encourage better/improved customer service practices. At present, we are trying out several cabling variations.

A literature search found several articles, mainly in the teacher education sector, on using videos to help enhance reflective practice. One article I have tapped for ideas is by Williams, G. Farmer, L. and Manwaring, M. (2008) on ‘new technology meets an old teaching challenge: Using digital video recordings, annotation software, and deliberate practice techniques to improve student negotiation skills’. The study was conducted with law students and although our project will not be going down the annotation route, I will follow up on the software mentioned in the article – Medianotes.

For the moment, we will concentrate on the ‘deliberate practice’ aspect, in particular, to identify the main skills students will need to develop, provide appropriate and timely feedback and assist the reflective learning cycle. For the feedback cycle, we will be providing students (as with previous projects) the guidelines to be able to feed up, feedback and feed forward (from  Hattie and Timperley's - power of feedback).

Video annotation tools vs video analysis tools

During the presentation by Dr. Laurent Filliettaz, excerpts of videos and transcripts from the videos were provided as examples of the data gathering and analysis of workplace based interactions between apprentice and trainer. From this, I could see that it would be important to have a way to bring transcripts and the video together in order to save time and multiple screenings. Therefore I had a look in the library for articles or books on video annotation.


An article by Rich & Hannatin (2009) in the Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 21 (2) caught my attention. This article reported on a project ‘ scaffolding video self-analysis discrepancies between preservice teachers’ perceived and actual instructional decision’ used a customised video analysis tool (VAT) to annotate the videos using a ‘commenting’ process to add speech bubbles to the videos.

The previous review of video analysis software shows that many of the tools are used in the sports areas and can be expensive when all we need to do in our project is to annotate the videos.

I then began an investigation into video annotation tools, as opposed to video analysis tools. nVivo provides for the facility to run a video and to have a transcript entry along with a blank column (for comments). I did the usual google search for ‘video annotation tool’ and came up with the following.

Anvil is a free for educational and research purposes and requires a email to the developers to obtain a copy. Seems to work very much like Audacity. Not sure if we will need all the bells and whistles but will email to obtain a copy to do a comparison with nVivo.

A simple video annotation tool might be the way to go if all we need to do is to put simple tags on the video.

Project pad provides a comprehensive tool with more information provided at open cast projects


So will need to follow up with trying things out on nVivo. As future iterations of the multimodal analysis project at CPIT will include collaboration with other polytechnics, I will also explore the use of Anvil and perhaps Transana, which has appeared on several research papers which require video data analysis (does cost small amount).