Introducing Mediathread: The Collaborative Multimedia Analysis Tool

Starting Fall 2024, Mediathread is now available for use in official Stanford courses. Mediathread makes it possible for instructors and students to collect, share, annotate, and analyze media all in one shared space. The tool supports the annotation of multiple media types, such as video, audio, and images. Instructors also have the flexibility of deciding whether assignment annotations, called Selection Assignments, are private between the instructor and the student only or visible to everyone in the class. 

Mediathread is directly integrated with Canvas, eliminating the need for instructors to manually add students to the site and eliminating an account creation step for both instructors and students. At this time, Mediathread is currently not available as a standalone tool. 

ARIEL STILERMAN

_{^{Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures}}

Professor Stilerman, an avid Mediathread user, first started utilizing Mediathread in 2014 for his Japanese Tea Ceremony course at Columbia University. He found Mediathread so invaluable in his course that he advocated for its implementation when teaching at Florida State and now at Stanford.

“I think the best way to learn is to do, and Mediathread really allows students to do.”

The Japanese Tea Ceremony course focuses on objects and includes field work, such as a hands-on Tea Ceremony workshop at Urasenke San Francisco. According to Stilerman, these once in a lifetime experiences create two problems (or two opportunities) for the instructor:

1. How to help students prepare for each workshop.
2. How to help students develop the tools, sensibility, curiosity, and knowledge to make the most of the experiences.

His solution? Prep work, with the help of Mediathread. Prior to the Tea Ceremony workshop, students must watch a film through Mediathread and (1) add two annotations directly to the video with the intention of connecting the selections to course readings and (2) add two annotations to selections they don’t fully understand, are curious about, or react negatively to. These annotations are then presented and discussed in-class prior to the workshop. This thought provoking activity helps his students prepare and anticipate the experience ahead of them.

Stanford’s Learning Technologies and Spaces Canvas team had the opportunity to hear directly from Stilerman about his Mediathread experience and the direct impact the tool has had in his teaching and his students’ learning.

How has Mediathread enhanced discussion in the classroom?

Stilerman: It allows students to engage with material asynchronously, in a way that then inspires class conversation. We look at their annotations on the big screen, rewatch together any passage of the film, and revisit the arguments or questions raised. It really becomes a way to guide and organize the in-class conversation, which is where, really, much of the learning happens.

How has Medithread enhanced your teaching experience?

Stilerman: In at least two ways. When students enjoy using a tool, there's a very positive energy that extends to other assignments as well. But there is also the commitment to do honor to a topic as complex as the Tea Culture of Japan, to its materials, practices and experiences. Mediathread enables me to do that - to meet the complexity of the subject with the complexity of the tool.

What would you say students most enjoy about Mediathread? 

Stilerman: I think what they like most is that the assignments ask them to do. To make something new. To create. To engage very actively with the material. You're not telling students to describe what's going on on the screen, but asking them to relate it to something else not on the screen: the texts, other objects, their affective reactions. So, that's an act of creative thinking. That's intellectual engagement. Students find that fun. I find it fun. They like thinking, creating, and making connections between issues or themes or objects that aren't obviously related. Mediathread invites you to do precisely that.

Do you think other departments and schools would find Mediathread useful?

Stilerman: That's the beauty of this campus. You throw out a tool and instructors in many other departments are going to find brilliant uses for it, and their students as well are going to come up with new uses for it. If you have a huge class, Mediathread saves you a lot of time. You cannot have 60 people say what they think synchronously. I think it's a really, really great tool to assess how students are engaging with the material. Any courses that use images would benefit from this tool. It gives you an immediate sense of what [video] passages are more popular, which are more problematic, which are perhaps overlooked. And those are the ones to play in class too.

Would you say Mediathread has a steep learning curve?

Stilerman: Students tell me the tool is not hard to use. It can feel a little unfamiliar in the beginning, perhaps, but there isn't really a learning curve, just a tiny step. If you address this early in the course, you're golden. As for the instructor, if you know how to use Canvas, you will be comfortable with Mediathread. The logic is different, so you do have to devote a good 10-15 minutes learning it, but after that, it becomes second nature.

Mediathread from the Student Perspective

Stilerman’s first ever Tea Ceremony course concluded with an anonymous end-of-quarter course evaluation. Students had an overwhelmingly positive reaction to Mediathread’s use in Silerman’s course. Most students responded with Excellent when asked how well Mediathread assignments contributed to their knowledge of the subject matter, their capacity for critical/analytical evaluation of the subject matter, and their interest in the discipline/subject, with the remaining students responding with Very Good.

Stilerman believes that “students who are really interested in the subject matter will learn better, they will do better at the assignment, attendance is going to be higher, and the mood in the room is going to be even more positive.” The course evaluation metrics are extremely helpful for instructors to understand the impact a tool has on the learning and overall experience of students.

Student Interviews

Q&A with James

Q&A with Emily

To learn more about Mediathread, check out the Instructor Guide to Mediathread and the Mediathread FAQ page.

To add Mediathread to your Canvas course or in a sandbox, contact canvashelp@stanford.edu.