Dive Brief:
- New Jersey Institute of Technology researchers have developed a search engine for multimedia course materials, giving students the ability to type in search terms and get slides and course texts as results.
- According to eCampus News, beta testing of the Ultimate Course Search engine showed just a few students dropping out from the experimental group in one course and half dropping out from the control group, indicating the tool could have a major impact on retention.
- Researchers are working to create text-to-speech functionality so students can get video results in their searches that highlight where in a recorded lecture or presentation their search term was said out loud.
Dive Insight:
Ultimate Course Search is designed to work like Google, providing search results in a hierarchy based on where it is mentioned in source documents. Developers also are experimenting with personalized search results. Results will be tailored to specific students based on their presumed learning preferences. Google also tailors search results based on where a user is located and what he or she has searched before. In some ways, that provides more relevant results. In other ways, it limits discovery. For students who don’t take good notes in their courses, however, any type of search functionality will undoubtedly help them review necessary course content in an increasingly multimedia world.