Automatic Summarization of Lecture Slides for Enhanced Student PreviewTechnical Report and User Study

Abstract

This paper is an extension of research originally reported in [1] . Here, we propose a novel method for summarizing lecture slides to enhance students’ preview efficiency and understanding of the content. Students are often asked to prepare for a class by reading lecture materials. However, because the attention span of students is limited, this is not always beneficial. We surveyed 326 students regarding the preview of lecture materials, revealing a preference for summarized materials to preview. Therefore, we developed an automatic summarization method for condensing original lecture materials into a summarized set. Our proposed approach utilizes image and text processing to extract important pages from lecture materials, optimizing selection of pages in accordance with a specified preview time. We applied the proposed summarization method to a set of lecture slides. In an experiment with 372 students, we compared the effectiveness of the summarized slides and the original materials in terms of quiz scores, preview achievement ratio, and time spent previewing. We found that students who previewed the summarized slides achieved better scores on pre-lecture quizzes, even though they spent less time previewing the material.