Tutorial videos of bioinformatics resources: online distribution trial in Japan named TogoTV

Abstract

In recent years, biological web resources such as databases and tools have become more complex because of the enormous amounts of data generated in the field of life sciences. Traditional methods of distributing tutorials include publishing textbooks and posting web documents, but these static contents cannot adequately describe recent dynamic web services. Due to improvements in computer technology, it is now possible to create dynamic content such as video with minimal effort and low cost on most modern computers. The ease of creating and distributing video tutorials instead of static content improves accessibility for researchers, annotators and curators. This article focuses on online video repositories for educational and tutorial videos provided by resource developers and users. It also describes a project in Japan named TogoTV (http://togotv.dbcls.jp/en/) and discusses the production and distribution of high-quality tutorial videos, which would be useful to viewer, with examples. This article intends to stimulate and encourage researchers who develop and use databases and tools to distribute how-to videos as a tool to enhance product usability.

Figure 1:

Screenshot of the MEXT Integrated Database Project portal (http://lifesciencedb.jp/en/). Paper icons and TV icons zoomed in the call-out following service names are linked to PDF documents and tutorial videos, respectively. MEXT, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan.

Figure 2:

Screenshot of the (A) international version of and (B) original version of TogoTV website. All contents are sorted by publishing date. There are list of category tags, daily/weekly/monthly ranking of playing video (only for the original site), publishing date, description, thumbnail, summary of the story and link to all captions in the video. When you click a date or thumbnail, a new page will open for playing the video (Figure 3A). When you click a sentence of summary, the video will start corresponding scene.

Figure 3:

Screenshot of TogoTV’s tutorial programs. Clicking the thumbnail in the center of the page will start the video. When the summary text of a video is clicked, the video will start the scene corresponding to the summary. There are links to recommended videos that are related playing video at the bottom of the page. (A) This video is entitled ‘How to use BodyParts3D/Anatomography 2010’. (B) This video is entitled ‘How to make probeID list for microarray using BioMart’.

Figure 4:

Screenshot of TogoTV’s lecture programs. There are the slides appeared in the presentation at the bottom of the page. When you click a slide, the video will start corresponding scene. (A) Video of voice-over on slides. (B) Live-action video.

Figure 5:

User feedback about TogoTV. External evaluation about the services provided by the Integrated Database Project was carried out via web from September to October 2009 [89]. There were 117 respondents including principal investigators, corporate researchers, postdocs and PhD students in total, and 60 peoples evaluated TogoTV. The question was ‘For this service, please give us feedback on how to proceed in the future’. Respondents chose from five options: ‘Because it seems pretty useful, I suggest it should be driven forward’ (Very good); ‘Because it seems useful in its own way, I suggest it may be driven forward’ (Good); ‘I do not have responsibility to assess it’ (No responsibility); ‘Because it seems unuseful, I suggest it need not be driven forward’ (Bad); and ‘Because it seems completely unuseful, it should be dropped’ (Very bad).