Tag Archives: interactive video

Interactive Video Quizzes Make Watching More Active

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Many online instructors create video lectures or include existing videos to model new skills and to expose students to new content. But how do you know that your students are engaged?

To make video watching an active learning experience, add Kaltura’s interactive quiz feature to your lectures or to YouTube videos. You can access Kaltura’s simple quiz tools from Canvas’s My Media tab, or provide Ecampus with quiz questions and let us build the quizzes for you.

Features:

  • Add multiple choice questions with 2-4 answers to any point in your video
  • Accompany the quiz with a pdf viewing guide containing all quiz questions
  • Graded and ungraded options
  • Integrated with the Canvas Assignment tool and Gradebook

How would you like students to interact with your videos? Depending on your needs, you can set Kaltura interactive video quizzes to:

  • Prevent students from advancing the video until they’ve answered each question
  • Prevent students from changing their answers
  • Reveal or withhold answers upon quiz submission
The question appears at the top of the video screen. Three answers are below, along with the option to "Skip for now" and a tally of the number of unanswered questions and an indication of which question this is.
Grammar question embedded in SPAN 211 video

In recent Ecampus courses, world languages faculty have embedded Kaltura interactive video questions at different points in videos to achieve different aims. In Second Year Spanish, grammar lectures conclude with questions that test students’ application of the grammar rules discussed earlier. The placement of questions at the end of the video holds students accountable for watching and understanding the entire lecture.

French author interview with questions interspersed along video progress bar
Numbered hexagons 1-6 indicate the placement of quiz questions in the video’s progress bar

In Introduction to French Literary Studies, interviews with authors are interspersed with questions that confirm students’ listening comprehension of topics directly after each topic is discussed. When students are unable to answer a question, they become aware of gaps in their French language listening skills and can rewatch the segment they misunderstood. Engaging in repeated listening is a critical second language learning strategy that instructors aim to foster in their students (Berne, 1998). Kaltura interactive video quizzes are a simple and fast method that gets the job done.

This tool’s usefulness isn’t limited to world languages faculty. Speak with your instructional designer about how to apply this tool to lectures and videos in your own academic discipline.

References and Resources

Berne, J. (1998). Examining the Relationship Between L2 Listening Research, Pedagogical Theory, and Practice 1. Foreign Language Annals, 31(2), 169-190.
Interactive Video Quiz Canvas Gradebook User Guide
Interactive Video Quizzes Guide for Creating Quizzes

Should You Consider an Interactive Video Lesson?

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If you are considering developing an online course with Ecampus, you may be curious how you will translate your lectures to the online format. There are several effective online lecture presentation formats available to faculty. They differ in the type of video recording required and the kind of post-production work required after the initial recording.

Image listing 4 formats for online lecture presentation: Video, narrated lecture, light board, and interactive video.
Online Lecture Formats: Qualities & Complexity

Each of the presentation formats can be effective, however the more complex types can offer additional advantages for your students. Why should you consider producing the most challenging of the five online lecture formats? To answer that question, we need to understand what exactly an interactive video lesson is. Let’s start by first looking at a sample interactive video lesson used in a fall 2017 course titled The Biology of Horticulture (HORT 301). You can watch a four minute excerpt of the twenty-minute interactive video lesson by selecting the image below:

Still image from video of Dr. Ryan Contreras teaching using an interactive video lesson in the Biology of Horticulture (HORT 301).
Dr. Ryan Contreras teaching using an interactive video lesson in the Biology of Horticulture course. Select image to watch the four minute video.

As is seen in this excerpt the interactive video lesson has as its foundation a video recording of a Lightboard presentation. Layered over that recording are interactive elements that control video playback—sometimes pausing, other times auto-advancing to specific clips—or to progress through the lesson, trigger a student’s input of feedback, and, most importantly, increase the amount of student engagement in the lesson. In the case of HORT 301 the interactive element prompts the solving of a temperature indices formula. The base video could have been used by itself. However, it is the melding of the Lightboard presentation with the interactive feature that makes the interactive video lesson a highly engaging presentation for the online environment.

The model below proposes how the elements of personal and mediated communication immediacy are brought together to make an interactive video lesson a compelling experience.

Model showing proposing how mediated communication and personal communication of an interactive video complement each other in an interactive video lesson.

In this project instructional design, in conjunction with visual design, video staging, and interaction design, was focused on solving the issue of how to teach a self-paced formula-drive lesson in the online environment. The result is an interactive video lesson that presents as a unified visual space that fosters an actual “see through” psychological perspective. Although clearly a media production, this approach to online lesson presentation implies an unmediated learning experience.

It is enhanced by the camera literally seeing through the Lightboard glass to the instructor conducting the lesson fostering a sense instructor presence. This type of interactive lesson design is desirable because it presents classroom-like learning in a student-controlled online environment. The result is an interactive video lesson that is new in design format but familiar experientially.

Is Interactive Video For You?
A decision to adopt this approach to lesson design will likely be successful if you have a lesson that is formula driven. Certainly math subjects and many science subjects might benefit from this approach. Is it also applicable to humanities courses? Can you imagine teaching language, music, or poetry with an interactive video lesson? If you can, contact Ecampus. We would be glad to help you adopt this approach to lesson design for use in your online course.