FVT: A fragmented video tutor for 'dubbing' software development tutorials

Rapid growth of online resources provides massive supports for developers to fulfill their learning tasks. Text tutorial and video tutorial, as the two most common forms of online resources, may not be sufficient to meet developers' specific learning needs if used individually. Text tutorials are well-structured and easy to be navigated, however, digesting the text description may not be always pleasant. Video tutorials are intuitive and easy to follow, however, the pre-determined teaching flow can be very distracting if a specific piece of knowledge is targeted. In this study, we proposed a novel method and its supporting tool-Fragmented Video Tutor (FVT), to facilitate the learning tasks with specific objectives, aiming at augmenting the strengths of both forms of tutorials while offsetting the weaknesses inherent to use each form of tutorials by itself. Specifically, FVT leverages the code snippets extracted from video tutorials as the bridge to link the video fragments in a video tutorial to the relevant sections in text tutorials. The preliminary evaluation results demonstrate that the FVT is a feasible approach to link two forms of tutorials and improve the learning effectiveness and efficiency for developers.