The inspiration for this tool came during a workshop Lloyd was giving at the University of Georgia about integrating technology and innovative approaches into higher education teaching. The use of video is increasing in all aspects of educational practice, both in the public schools and in corporate training - video is the new PowerPoint. During the workshop, a question was asked about the availability of simple and free (or low cost) video analysis tools that student teachers could use to meet both their certification requirements and to help them review and reflect on their emerging teaching skills. Although there are several excellent video analysis tools available for educational researchers, these are expensive and complicated to use. Lloyd decided to explore creating a simple video analysis tool given his interest in programming educational resources. At the same time, he was teaching a doctoral level design course where many students were interested in analyzing videos of complex learning situations as part of their reearch. These two immediate goals shaped the initial design of Lloyd's Video Analysis Tool.
As the tool's design progressed, it was clear that the tool should also address the need of anyone who wanted to capture some event on video and analyze it thoughtfully for themes and concepts. For example, Lloyd used the tool to analyze and annotate some old home movies from his youth he happened to stumble upon. Lloyd also creates lots of videos for his online teaching. These all need to have transcriptions to meet accessibility standards. Having been disappointed with many approaches and commercial tools to create transcriptions, he came up with a simple manual transcription tool, which is now embedded in the app. So, the tool's design encompasses a wide range of video analysis needs.
Finally, one of the most important guiding principles to the tool's design was simplicity.
Lloyd's Video Analysis Tool is the result of these ideas, needs, and design principles. He is tempted just to give the tool away, but hopes that people will see the modest price of this tool as a reasonable way to support this and future software design efforts.