STVALL: Towards the concept of education through Smart TV
This project has been co-financed by the Ministry of Economy and Infrastructure of the Junta de Extremadura and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) of Extremadura (Ref. IB16160).
Introduction
The STVALL project, funded by the Junta de Extremadura (Spain), has as its main objective to develop an English teaching platform based on HbbTV technology for interactive television that offers customized training pills to a user or a group of users. The HbbTV standard is available on a good number of televisions, with great development in Europe and good progress in the rest of the world. The training pills have been created by a team of experts, who have paid special attention to the fact that in addition to being effective they are enjoyable for the users.
Goals
The STVALL project aims to improve the English level of people with a pleasant method and personalized content through Smart TV. We have studied the best technology to reach the greatest number of people and we have designed educational activities adapted to television.
To achieve this general objective, the following specific objectives have been established:
- Analyze the different devices, standards and possibilities of interactive application development in both DTT and smart TV.
- Create an application development guide for the selected devices and establish the usability evaluation method of these applications
- Analyze different techniques for recommending audiovisual content according to user preferences and characteristics and according to social relationships (shared interests, etc.) with other users. Contemplate individual and group recommendation.
- Design demonstrator / example of interactive educational applications with integrated recommendation / customization systems.
- Evaluate the educational effectiveness of applications developed in various scenarios.
Methodologies and Phases
The work plan is divided into three parts. The first part is about studying the devices, standards and their possibilities. In the second part we will face the development of the tools / demonstrators with which we want to prove the viability of the project and, finally, we will focus on the different analyzes on the products generated.
Conclusions
The STVALL project helps improve English learning through smart TV. To this end, the characteristics presented by this device have been taken into account and the technology that allows a greater diffusion has been studied. As a result, the design of a system consisting of an application that uses HbbTV technology has been obtained, whose objective is to serve as an interface for the user, a server in charge of the process of the inputs and outputs of the system, a storage system to store information and an authoring tool to manage the system.
Users have an application on their televisions that allows them to improve their level of English through educational activities focused on entertainment to increase their motivation. In addition, these activities will be adapted to their knowledge and preferences, achieving individual and different learning for each user. It also takes into account group participation, generating a user model together so that the experience offered by the application is the most satisfactory for each member.
Currently, the STVALL project is in the design stage, seeking a future deployment through a means of communication for evaluation with real users.
