That was some clickbait, wasn’t it? It will be worth it, I promise.
Colleagues, here is a problem I have faced for a long time: I use a lot of video materials (hello, PBS Frontline!), but my students do not know how to watch videos. That’s right. They can sit and watch something but not be able to extract the main points or ideas presented. And the longer and more complex the video is, the worse it is for them. So, I’ve been looking for ways to help them watch and understand videos.
One way is mind mapping, which is a post for another day.
The other is to find a way to make them see where the natural segments or chapters of a video are and stop for a minute to think about how they understand the segment they just watched. I can write instructions to that effect but interactive elements would be more effective, I think.
Enter Yuja. Yuja is a tool we have available in Blackboard and that we can use in different ways. Use the link to access the college’s main page and your videos (if you have any), using your regular COD login and password.
You can simply use Yuja as a video management tool: you can record, upload, publish, share, and post videos into your Blackboard courses.
But the real power of Yuja, I think, is its capacity to integrate quizzes directly into a video, and have that quiz also integrated into your Blackboard gradebook and therefore treated like any other gradebook element you have in your class.
It is not necessarily the easiest tool to use, so, I want to thank Mike Maxse and Min Pan for spending an hour with me, working through the different aspects of Yuja. I don’t think I would have figured it out without them.
And I also want to thank Susan Landers for listening to my whining about getting a tool to integrate quizzes in videos.
Anyhoo, I have two tutorial videos for you guys today. In the first one, I’ll work with Yuja Media, for the video management aspect of it. And in the second one, I’ll create a quiz within a YouTube video and integrate it into my gradebook.
There are limitations though, to the capacity to create in-video quizzes: you can only do on MP4 videos you upload into Yuja Media or with YouTube videos. I wish there were more acceptable formats (like Vimeo). Hopefully, Yuja will broaden its capacity.
And if I had my druthers, I would get to create Yuja quizzes in Kanopy videos because Kanopy is awesome.
Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert on Yuja, so, the way I use it might be a bit “clunky”. Nevertheless, I get the job done.
So, without further ados, here is part one on Yuja Media:
And here is part 2 on creating in-video quizzes, integrated into your gradebook:
Personally, I have used the quizzes so far, in my face-to-face classes, to dispense with the first day syllabus review, which is tedious and boring. I created a video, going through my syllabus, integrating questions as I went, to ensure student comprehension. It worked just fine.
I intend to use this more and more with actual course content.
I hope you found this useful.
Christine
