O n f e r e n c e

IMPLEMENTING VIDEO CONTENT: THE VIDEO.DE APPLICATION 
Design principles 
For any successful CALL design, it is essential to know the characteristics of the context 
and the end users (Levy 1999). In the case of the present project, the annotation tool 
was elaborated in a pilot study for German language education that involves collaboration 
between different partner institutions of the Association KU Leuven (Campus Antwerpen, 
HU Brussel and KU Leuven) and different language programs (Applied Linguistics, 
Linguistics, Business Communication and Commercial sciences). Considering this 
diversity in our target group, our main concern was to design a web-based tool that is 
flexible enough to meet the needs of all involved project partners. Also, flexibility is 
essential to ensure further expandability of the application to other academic language 
programs than German. This need for flexibility in our tool design was translated into two 
basic principles: layering and granularity.
By layering we mean the attribution of various annotation parameters to the video file, 
which are structured under a fixed number of categories, such as vocabulary, discourse, 
part of speech etc. These main annotation categories are clearly defined and consist of 
universal linguistic features to ensure wide applicability of the tool. The parameters, on 
the other hand, are flexible and can be defined according to the annotation task. Each 
video is thus coded by the student for a number of parameters so that it can be used for 
didactic purposes on different levels. For instance, a video fragment of an interview can 
be used in vocabulary and grammar training for students at a basic level of the language 
acquisition process (German), while the same fragment can also serve to analyze specific 
discursive features of that genre at a high level of linguistic training such as a master 
class. In this way, the content of the annotation task can be tailored to the subject of the 
class.
Granularity concerns the unit of analysis, to which the parameters can be attached. The 
video can be coded on the level of the whole video file 
–
the metadata 
–
, and on the level 
of a sentence and word (group) 
–
the annotations. The coding on the level of the whole 
file, viz. adding metadata-specifications, is done by the language instructor, whereas the 
coding is done by the student in a managed task. 
Furthermore, we also wanted to enable peer assessment across campuses, to give the 
students the opportunity to see and evaluate each other’s work. Peer assessment 
enhances the learning process and it has the obvious advantage of reducing the amount 
of time that the language instructor needs to spend for that activity (Davies 2007). Thus, 
we incorporated a basic system into our tool that enables students to view and compare 
their annotations with those of their peers after they have submitted their annotation 
task.