ReView: A Digital Video Player to Support Music Practice and Learning

Thanks to the emergence of digital video, producing and distributing video is now possible in ways that were previously limited to video production companies. Yet the functions of current digital media players differ little from the VCR’s play, rewind, fast-forward, and pause functions, which may not support learning tasks appropriately. Therefore, we designed an enhanced digital media player, ReView, to better support video-based learning. To test ReView’s usefulness, advanced music students in the Young Artists Programme of the National Arts Centre of Canada were given the opportunity to use the media player to review a video recorded lesson. In this paper, we present the students’ ratings of the usefulness of ReView’s features, and the frequency with which the features were used. We discuss these findings with respect to technological support for browsing video content. Additionally, we present findings related to the content of the video that the students chose to watch. Specifically, we found that students prefer to watch themselves play rather than review instructions received from a coach.