June 22, 2009. The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) is pleased to announce that Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning (VITAL), a web-based application for video analysis and multimedia essay writing will be released to the public under an open source license.

VITAL offers a comprehensive, course-based system that includes the ability to manage courses with their unique syllabi, assignments, video library, and student rosters. VITAL focuses on the writing of "multimedia essays" that satisfy course assignments designed to prompt students to closely observe and interpret the course video content. Students develop arguments that are supported by cited video evidence. The video evidence is compiled using a video clipping, annotation, and tagging workspace.

This Java-based iteration of the VITAL codebase has been released under the Educational Community License, Version 2.0.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ESI-0353402. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.