Introduction
In this article we will walk you through the intended purpose of Interactive Video.
A great benefit of online/hybrid learning is the use of multimedia materials (documents, audios, and videos) to increase student engagement and address diverse learning needs. Here you can read more about the importance of student engagement↗.
However, students often passively consume the recorded material assigned before class, thus coming to lectures unprepared and teachers have to explain the content again which wastes valuable class time.
Interactive Video helps address this issue by using social annotation to activate student engagement with the video materials.
Here you can find our user guides for Interactive Video:
How It Works
Using videos is a great way for students to engage with the course content. Being able to pause and replay content when needed makes it possible for students to process the learning material at their own pace. Besides this, there are plenty of possibilities to make a video interactive so students can interact with the course material, with their peers, and with the teacher. The meta-analysis of Bernard et al. (2009) has shown the importance of interaction when teaching online: the study shows that letting students interact in the three ways mentioned above (student-content, student-student, student-teacher) positively affects their learning.
With our Interactive Video tool, students are rewarded for engaging with content and encouraged to participate in discussions and ask questions embedded in the material. At the same time, teachers gain insight into progress and performance essential for judging the uptake of material.
The use of social annotation enhances student engagement with video materials. Here’s why:
Create video activity: Instructors upload and add in-line questions or discussion threads to specific moments of the videos, and also decide which ones are compulsory to answer before proceeding to the next.
Provide input and participate in discussion: Students watch the videos, answer the annotated questions and discussions. They can also add their own questions or discussions by adding timestamps in the video.
Access student learning analytics: Teachers track students’ performance in the activity to monitor their progress and intervene when necessary.
Highlighted Features
To get the most out of Interactive Video, educators have made use of the following features to support their existing pedagogy.
Upload or record video: Instructors can upload videos of various file types from their computer. They can also record a video or their screen directly without needing a third-party tool.
Practice questions and comments: Add discussion points, multiple choice or open questions directly to certain points of your video to stimulate active participation with and comprehension of the material. Optionally make certain questions compulsory to answer before proceeding, or allow students to start their own discussions too.
Multimedia attachments to questions: Include attachments in the form of documents or images to the questions to incorporate different media and provide broader context. You can even leave a voice-note to let students hear it directly from you.
Configurable grades: Choose whether to grade students based on criteria you set, such as answering questions (correctly) or participating in discussions, then synchronize the results with your native LMS.
Learning analytics export: Follow students' progress and performance within the tool, and download the analytics (in csv or excel file) for an even more thorough analysis.
Copyrighted materials: Choose whether to prevent students from downloading or modifying the materials in accordance with your copyright policy.
Upload videos from other platform: Instructors can upload videos from 3rd-party video platforms via URL if the video is publicly available. Interactive Video supports Youtube, Vimeo, Twitter, Kaltura, VidGrid, Panopto, Mediasite, Yuja, Echo360, Ubicast, Presentations, 2Go and Libcast.
Benefits of using Interactive Video
Activate asynchronous engagement during before class preparation: Interactive video tool helps stimulate student – content interaction by allowing instructors to add in-line questions or discussions and turn the study materials into a space for meaningful dialogues. Students can respond to the questions and discussion threads, and at the same time make their own queries. This process is critical to gauge student preparedness and enable deeper discussions during synchronous sessions.
Build up students’ understanding of the study materials: The questions and comments posted in the Interactive Study Material highlight the most common issues or problems encountered by students, thus enabling teachers to adapt the synchronous sessions to address learners’ needs.
Boost students’ learning and assessment: This tool enhances learning through both the forming of knowledge and the assessment of students’ understanding on specific topics.
Good to Know
The teacher can lock the practice questions, requiring students to answer them before continuing to watch the video.
The teacher can introduce open discussion moments by adding a comment in the video where students must contribute.
The teacher can assign grades to this assignment, giving weight to student performance or participation in the activity (such as contributing to or starting discussions).