Watch and Interact: How do you Make your Videos Interactive?

Context

Over the past years, instructional videos have become an important part of higher education. More and more instructors are using videos in their face-to-face, hybrid/blended, and in fully online courses to deliver lectures, instructions, training, present course content, demonstrate specific techniques, hold discussions. Instructors are using videos for assignments and student activities. It has become one of the most used multimedia element for well-designed courses. Instructors across all disciplines are using videos as effective teaching tools. In a large class, lecture videos are used to flip the classroom so students can come to the class well prepared and instructors can use the freed time to explain concepts and course materials more effectively. Now it is possible for anyone with a mobile phone to make a video and instantly upload via social media and to servers in the cloud. Online courses greatly depend on videos for lectures and course communications. One of the greatest challenges with videos is related to student engagement and active learning. An important aspect of creating educational videos is to include elements that help promote student engagement. If students don’t watch the videos, they can’t learn from them.

Have you ever wondered if your students are really watching all those videos in your course? Instructors sometimes have no idea if the students actually watched these videos at all. In a face-to-face class, instructors can easily assess student engagement by observing and asking content related questions. In an online environment, it is difficult to tell if the students have actually watched these lectures, instructional or content videos.  In case of long videos, this is always a bigger challenge. If the learners don't view and pay attention to these instructional videos, it is virtually ineffective and does not meet the learning goal. In this session, we want to address these challenges and discuss some available tools and technologies that can make videos interactive and engaging. The students watch these videos and at the same time interact and answer questions related to these videos. This increases student interest in the topic and they are more focused on the lesson. They are actively involved in the video whether they are taking a quiz, participating in discussions, or answering a simple question. Students actively watch these videos instead of passive viewing.

Learning Goals

• Learn the pedagogy behind using videos in face-to-face, blended and online courses

• Benefits of using videos in courses and training modules

• Discuss and learn the impact and challenges of videos as a teaching tool in higher education

• Learn about some tools and technologies that make videos interactive and promote student engagement

• Learn about the very basic functionalities of these tools and watch some examples

• Explore and share tips and best practices

• Share ideas on how to integrate these tools into your teaching!

Tools and Technologies

In this session, we intend to present and discuss various instructional tools that can make videos interactive by embedding or adding quizzes and discussions within these videos. There is a vast number of tools and technologies are available, we want to discuss the ones that we applied to our course design at North Carolina State University. We explored some of these tools such as PlayPosIt (formerly eduCannon), EDPuzzle, Vialogues, H5P, TED-ED and MindTap in various courses in Engineering, Education, Business and other disciplines. The faculty is becoming more and more interested to use these tools to make their lecture and instructional videos interactive.  Some of these tools allow instructors to monitor student progress, assess student performance through embedded quizzes in the videos. To enhance critical thinking videos are often used to spark student discussions. Some tools such as Vialouges allows students to engage in lively discussion around a video. We used MindTap from Cengage to present students with a specific counseling scenario to watch.  Students are required to reflect and discuss questions related to this scenario while watching the video. Currently, we have integrated H5P with our learning management system, an open source, a community-driven project to create rich interactive content, including interactive videos. We will show a demonstration of these tools and how they can be used in different courses. At the same time, the audience will actively participate in using these tools during the interactive session.

Audience Engagement

• The attendees will be presented with a few questions at the different point of our presentation. We will use online polling tools and sticky notes to capture and compare these answers:

  • What technology, tools you use for video engagement or anything similar?

  • What are the challenges you face?

  • How can you incorporate these tools we discussed in your teaching or course design?

• The audience can pair up with a partner, give them a note card and fun handout to share their thoughts about incorporating engaging interactive tool in the future and share it with the rest of the audience (or a mobile app)

• While working with these tools they will have an opportunity to ask questions

Program Format, & Presentation Outline

• Brainstorming activity as participants enter:

• Overview of the topic & introduction of presenters

• Learning goals of the session and recap of brainstorming

• Overview of the topic

  • Videos in higher education

  • Benefits of using videos

• Instructional challenges of using videos

  • Audience poll and activities on instructional challenges

• What is video engagement?

  • Possible Solutions

• Using Tools & Technology

  • Short description of some selected tools (Playposit, EDpuzzle, MindTap, Vialogues, TED-Ed, H5P)

    • What is it used for?

    • Demo/Screenshots

  • Audience poll and hands-on activities

• Tips and best practices

• Takeaways

• Closing with Q&A

Resources

• Schwan, S., & Riempp, R. (2004). The cognitive benefits of interactive videos: learning to tie nautical knots. Learning and Instruction, 14(3), 293-305.

• Kleftodimos, A., & Evangelidis, G. (2016). Using open source technologies and open internet resources for building an interactive video-based learning environment that supports learning analytics. Smart Learning Environments, 3(1), 9.