Interactive Audio lets you upload an audio file and add practice questions or comments to it. Practice questions help you and students gauge their comprehension of the audio contents. Furthermore, questions and comments can help guide students to the most important arguments in the audio file, or jump start online discussions about its contents so that students are better prepared for class. 

After you have created a new Interactive Audio in your LMS or on the platform, you see the following screen.

If you want to reuse a previous Interactive Audio from yourself or one of your colleagues, click on use copy of existing. A copy of this existing assignment will be made, copying all teacher contributions (comments, questions, instructions). Student contributions are not copied. 

Set-up

If you want to create a new assignment, start with filling out the title. Depending on your LMS, the title you set when creating the assignment in your LMS is already copied here. You can read more here on changing the name of the assignment in your LMS or in FeedbackFruits.

Step 1: Instructions

At the instructions step, you are able to provide the students information about the use and aim of the assignment. Furthermore, you can select if you would like the student contributions to be visible to everyone in the assignment, or have them divided and only visible to group members.

Contribute individually, see contributions within groups

Students are able to see all contributions of all participants in the assignment.

Contribute individually, see contributions within groups
This option lets your students discuss the material in smaller groups. Or you can make the video accessible per class instead of publishing it to all students in the course. With this settings enabled students will only see answers to Question Cards from group members and Discussion Threads posted by group members. In Discussion Threads posted by the teacher, they will see all student answers.
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After enabling the option, you have to define the groups you want to use in the LMS. See this article on how to select the appropriate groups for your Interactive Video when FeedbackFruits is fully integrated in your LMS. Can't select groups from your LMS? This article explains how to create your own groups using a CSV file.

When using groups, students only see the annotations of students within their group. As a teacher, you can filter on a specific group, or see the annotations of all students in the assignment. In the Overall Student Progress overview, you will see the metrics per group.

Step 2: Audio

To upload an audio file, drag and drop your audio file, or click choose audio to search for it on your computer. If your desired audio file can be found online, copy and paste the link in the paste link field. If you want to use a link to an audio file, it is important to this link is publicly available.

After you've uploaded the audio file, you can start with editing the settings. Click on open audio to view the video and start adding questions and comments. If you want to replace the audio file with a different one, you can click on change file.

When you have uploaded your audio, click open audio to view it and add practice questions and/or comments. Select the right timeframe in the audio to link a practice question or comment to this specific part. 

Practice questions are inline practice moments for students and can be added by the teacher as well as by students when enabled (see settings). Comments can be questions or discussion points and can be added by the teacher as well as by students when enabled. Students (and teachers) are able to reply to each other's comments, making it possible to have inline discussions. Click here for more information on how to add a comment or practice question. 

Click on a tab to expand the settings field for each corresponding tab. 

Scheduling deadlines

It is possible to have a start and/or end date by which the students are able to make contributions to the assignment (see image below). For more information on how to set this up, and how this affects the assignment, click here.

Student contribution
By default, students are allowed to post comments to the audio file. Comments can stimulate interactivity with the study material, but this might not always be desirable depending on your set-up. Therefore, this option can also be disabled.

It is also possible to say that students are allowed to create question cards (disabled by default). Having students ask and answer their own and their peers' questions can be a valuable learning experience. Therefore, this can be enabled if desired.

When you allow students to post their own practice questions, you will see a new option appear: students can see each other's answers on practice questions created by students. When enabling this option, students will be able to see anonymised answers from their peers after they have answered the question themselves.

Anonymity

All students' contribution in this activity (discussions, questions and answers to questions) are shown to their peers using pseudonyms. Teachers always see the contributor's name.

Copyright protection

Disabling this option stops students from downloading the audio. Otherwise, students will see a download button, which allows them to download the original audio file. If you use a link to an audio file on the internet, you will not have this option. Students will not be able to download the audio file, but will be able to navigate to the website where the audio file is hosted.

Custom Subtitles

It is also possible to add custom subtitles. Click on 'add' to open the subtitle menu, here you can add or hide subtitles. You upload subtitles via .srt or .vtt file. If you don't yet have a subtitles file, you can also create your own. Read here how you can create this file.

Add module
Additional modules can be added to the assignment to further the pedagogical value of the assignment. These learning steps can be added by clicking on the brown plus-button at the bottom of the assignment in 'edit' mode.
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Configurable Grading

Grading can be added to the assignment in the form of the Configurable Grading module. Here you are able to grade students based on their participation (for example, did they participate in all the discussions) and performance (how did they score on the Question Cards). You can find more information in the link above.

Participation Grading

Grade the students' feedback based on their own selected best contributions. Create a safe online learning environment in which students feel free to contribute, because they feel the safety of only being graded on what they themselves mark as their best comments. Read more here on how to set it up.

Reflect on the activity

A reflection step can be added to the assignment that can be graded optionally and should be completed after the main assignment. It is possible to set a separate deadline for this step, to set a minimum and maximum word count and additional instructions.

When you are finished with setting up your assignment, click publish or save in the top-right corner of the screen. 

After you publish the audio file, you can click the edit button in the top-right corner of the screen to edit the assignment (change the file, edit the instructions, enable/disable students downloading the audio, adding practice questions and/or comments) or the three dots to download the original audio file, without comments/practice questions. 

You have now finished setting up your Interactive Audio!