Many instructors have been looking for better methods to engage students online, especially when it comes to asking for more than passively watch videos. Placing engagement opportunities in our lectures, demos, and other training materials has been tricky to say the least. However, PlayPosit may have the solution. PlayPosit is an interactive video tool within Canvas which allows you to build engagement directly into your videos. Want students to have a discussion on a particular law mid-video? Not a problem. Introduce a poll to uncover potential incorrect foundational concepts. Add free response reflective writing or summative assessment toward the end of your videos. Students can also freely make use of the notetaking feature which will save the exact point in the video where each note was taken.
All of this can be achieved through interactions, which PlayPosit calls “Bulbs”, that you can custom build or pull from one of the pre-built templates. These results can also be sent to the Gradebook as Playposit will auto grade some responses; however, written responses will still need to be hand graded. In total, there are six interaction types: Multiple Choice, Check All That Apply, Fill in the Blank, Free Response, Poll, and Discussion, with the latter three needing to be manually graded. There is also a pausing feature for writing your own annotations or embed links to other locations that have deeper knowledge on a specific topic, should a student be interested.
One of many great aspects of PlayPosit is that you don’t need to recreate any video content. PlayPosit allows you to pull video from multiple sources including your videos already being stored in Kaltura. Getting started with the tool is fairly simple. If you would like to make use of PlayPosit’s automatic grading, you’ll create an assignment and next to “Submission Type” select “External Tool” and choose PlayPosit from the list. You can add PlayPosit to any Page, Module, or Discussion using the Apps (plug-in) icon in the rich text editor. However, those interactions will not be sent to the Gradebook. You can find a step-by-step walkthrough of using PlayPosit in IU Pressbooks.
Go poking around in PlayPosit and see what you can create! We’re excited to see how you use it to engage your students. As always, if you’d like assistance don’t hesitate to contact your Teaching and Learning Center for support.
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