[ARCHIVED] Course design with a lot of videos

[venitk]

I'd love to hear about designing a course with a lot of videos in each unit. I'm trying to avoid the scroll of death (which would happen if all the videos were placed on one page) but also I don't want to be disorganized and have the videos strewn over a lot of different pages in each unit. The videos are not easily grouped by content. I would also like the videos embedded in the content, rather than linked. Any best practices or successes to share?

[Shar]

Hi Katie Venit,

You're asking for a tall order there with the necessity to have so many videos but not all on one page and not on several pages throughout but embedded in the content. My mind is exploding just thinking of all that.

So what I will share is that I have a few courses up with tons of videos; 1 course has 217 short videos but I do not plan on using all of them. In general when I have a lot of videos, I prefer to list them in an ordered table with open in a new tab rather than crowd the page with embedded content. These videos are generally grouped by lesson because they are the recorded lecture snippets from an instructor bring their in-person course online.

The problem is that a student would have to remember which videos they watched. Recently I've decided to tackle this problem with using a multiple-answer survey with each answer as a video link.

The survey will keep the responses and as a bonus I can make it a graded survey for "participation". In the Canvas Student app, the links will not open in a new window as the checkbox takes precedence, so I put in a note "Please use a full-size web browser to view these videos" if the student's screen is too small.

Initially the student has to press the Start Quiz or Resume Quiz button to see the links, but once they submit the survey, all the links show up on the page as the survey shows their responses. I piloted this feature last week with 1 lesson of 7 videos and some students have watched the videos and some are still in progress, so we'll see if it works well enough to put into full production for a whole course worth of lecture videos.

I'm sure you'll get other ideas for what to do with many videos. I personally do not like to put more than 3 on a page and I always want some lead-in text for the video so that there is a context.

Cheers - Shar

[venitk]

Putting the videos in as a quiz is such an intriguing idea! Thanks, Shar, that sort of ingenuity is just what I was hoping to learn about.

[Shar]

An addendum:

I'm using 1 row tables for layout in the answer, I have added  role="presentation" to the table to prevent it from being read as a table to a screen reader. As per the discussion on accessible borders around text.

Happy Friday,
Cheers - Shar

[laurakgibbs]

This idea for tracking stuff is GENIUS. Bookmarking for future reference!

[kbink]

Videos in quizzes is a great idea.  I've set up videos in quizzes slightly differently.  What I did is have a text question that embeds the first video, then I ask low level or reflection questions about the video, followed by a feedback or answer text question.  This gives the student a chance to verify that they've learned the content, and is especially useful if this is more of a flip or online course.  You could keep it a survey to have points earned just for completion and provide some non-specific but immediate feedback.  

1. First question is a text question with intro text and directions to watch the embedded video, and embed the video.
2. Second question is an essay question that asks for a reflection, explanation, opinion.  Something like explain the key difference between conifers and flowering plants, or What were the three causes of the civil war, or do your friends think global warming is being caused by humans?  What reasons do they give for their answers?
3. The feedback question can give an exemplar correct answer, can point out common mistakes or provide new information that leads to the next video.

The advantage of this is that you get videos collected into groups and then you could list these Lesson quizzes , shortening your scroll.  Also its good pedagogy to have student check understanding and get immediate feedback.  Finally, the answers they put in can in essence become their notes which they can see on the review page (let them see the answers).  And I checked.  Students can print the quiz review page and then they have a PDF of their answers/notes if they want to see them.

Jeez, I guess you could make each video an essay question and just tell students to take notes in the answer box and they print them as a PDF after the lesson.

I'm trying this in an online course on career development, and the essays are places for them to jot down ideas for people they could contact or groups that interest them or ideas about what careers they'd like to purse and why.  Course hasn't run yet, so I can't tell you if it will work.

Kalli

[bdalton_sales]

The table could work well if each page the videos existed on were added to a module with a completion requirement to "mark as done" so the student can literally tick off each video, if they visit the page again they will see its maked as done.

[debra_mansperge]

I just developed a template in which I could group lots of videos without the students having to scroll too much. I made a list of topics (I know you said yours weren't easily grouped) that sent students directly to that topic and then created links back to the topic list at the end of the videos in that section.  Here's a small portion of one of the pages I created with it.

If you're interested, I could send you the code for the blank page.

[venitk]

That's a great idea... it wouldn't work with this course, but I can see that working with other courses I work on!

[ellenbcutler]

It may not be quite the same thing, but I teach art history and collect reading assignments (links and pdfs), videos, jpgs and other miscellany on padlet walls and provide links on each module for the required resources. There is pretty much no limit to what you can put on a wall and such walls (particularly grid and shelf formats) are really easy to accommodate visually.  Then I also (mainly for my own conveniences) collect all the individual walls in a "wall of walls" so I, as instructor, can keep on top of things.

Here is a "wall of walls." https://padlet.com/ebcutler/cubismreadings  (I make all these padlets public so you shouldn't have trouble seeing them.)  Here is one particular module's wall from that collection: https://padlet.com/ebcutler/cezannerdgs . Finally, here is the picture gallery that goes with that module. This one is a grid whereas the other two are shelves. https://padlet.com/ebcutler/cezanne 

[venitk]

Padlet is a really neat idea, thanks Ellen. I hadn't thought of that. Organizing them visually like that would be helpful.

[natasha_sutevsk]

I wonder if using this 'video carousel' technique would be useful? Though you will need to play with the html code in the page to set it up...

Video Carousel: Canvahacks Demo Course 

[venitk]

That...is...GENIUS. I'll have to fiddle with the carousels. Have you tested it on mobile?

[jdick1]

Holy cow, I am totally saving this solution! Thanks for sharing!

[Boekenoogen]

We used the Video Carousel for a little bit. It became too much for our faculty because they could not handle the complex way the videos were stored and displayed. I do like the carousel look and I think our students did too, but simplicity won out over function. 

[rebecca_lambert]

What a great way of presenting videos!

[Boekenoogen]

I would like to give a shout out to Kaltura. We are now starting to use the "Add a quiz in the middle of your video" function and it is turning out great. We love the fact that it will connect to the Canvas Gradebook.