Due to the accessibility and flexibility that it provides, the use of online video lectures for university courses facilitates educational opportunities that aren’t bound by location and time. Students’ engagement and ultimately, their performance can easily be lost with an inefficient delivery system. Just like in the physical classroom, students’ learning environment matters when delivering online video lectures.
To achieve optimal results from using online video lectures in your university, you need to deliberately put certain strategies in place to ensure student usage of and engagement with school video content.
1. Make your online course platforms easy for students to use.
This is an obvious first step, but the question that needs answering is: what are the actual changes that you can implement to achieve ease of use for students?
Start by providing transcripts to all videos, and make them downloadable too. The ways that students prefer to study differ greatly. Some students assimilate faster by listening, and others prefer to read texts. Another group includes those who need to listen and read the texts along with the video in order to have a full grasp of the content.
In order to get better students’ usage of video course content, make the videos’ transcripts available and downloadable for offline study.
Also, ensure that you have a well-organized media library of video courses. The easier it is for students to navigate a course platform and find what they need, the better the engagement.
Let instructors easily create and add tags to group-related media for easy organization. Students can use the tags to curate a playlist of videos or sort videos by lesson.
Letting students choose the way that they interact with school videos by using in-video searches and sort options engages and empowers them.
2. Allow students to make contributions
A common challenge of teaching students with video course content is the struggle to hold their attention and keep them engaged. After all, instructors will not be present while students are learning with these videos.
Tackle this by allowing students to make contributions while also interacting with other students and instructors. You can do this by using a task-based learning approach. This method of creating video course content gets students fully engaged and committed to the course with accompanying real-life tasks.
This approach becomes easier when the platform hosting your school video content makes provisions for students to upload media content to a media library either as a contribution or for assessment.
3. Hold students accountable
In order to increase students’ engagement with school video courses, you have to build accountability into the usage of the videos. Accountability on the part of the student will spur commitment.
To do this, you need to have insights into how each student interacts with the school videos, aka analytics. This might require a deeper look beyond a snapshot of all the grades usually provided by the learning management system.
While grades are crucial for measuring student performance, tracking student progress cuts across other vectors, such as attendance and participation.
Video engagement insights, such as how many times a student views a video and for how long and what videos they watched and which ones they left uncompleted, can give you a broader range of information about student usage.
Accountability is when you use these insights to show each student their level of participation and then prompt further engagement actions (this could be as simple as automated reminder messages). When students know that you can see their level of participation, it prompts a sense of responsibility and accountability on their part.
In fact, a video platform with robust analytics like Warpwire can further integrate analytics with external tools like Tableau to create rich and informative visualizations.
4. Simulate “humanized” classes
Uploading recorded video lectures for students to watch at their convenience is great. But adding live classes and real-time video interactions to the mix will take engagement to a whole other level. This approach models the dynamics and connections that occur in an in-person classroom.
Live classes provide opportunities for real-time interactions with students through chats and comments. This humanizes the class, encourages debate, and provides immediate answers to questions that students might have.
Social functions, such as commenting on and sharing content, are how most of us are used to interacting.
Using a video platform makes it easy for instructors to create live classes with live chat, so those watching can interact with the instructor and other viewers, which will increase student engagement with video lectures.
Another way to humanize video lectures is to seek feedback from the students. Any chance for students to leave feedback is a great opportunity for interaction. Also, the feedback can help you identify areas of improvement that can increase school video content usage.
With this type of interactive approach, students are left with no other choice than to take an active role in their learning.
5. Don’t leave anyone out
The whole goal of creating video content lectures is to make it possible for any student to access the videos without any form of constraints, like time and location. This purpose is defeated if some individuals find learning difficult using the video content.
School video content should be designed and presented to meet every user’s needs. For instance, closed captions are essential for meeting the needs of the deaf and hard of hearing. Failure to include such a solution in your video platform will alienate students with such needs.
Use is a video platform that provides various watch accessibility features for students. This can include options like closed captions, translations, colorblind-friendly design, and keyboard shortcuts.
Powering student engagements with technology
If you have closely followed all the strategies shared up to this point, you will notice that they are all anchored by technology. From ease of use to creating interactive experiences, you need the right platform for your video content.
Hosting your videos on the right video platform will provide all the tools that you need to power the strategies that will increase usage and engagement with school video content.
However, you don’t want to sacrifice the security of your content or disrupt the system that you have in place while making a video platform choice. Warpwire offers the ability to capture and securely distribute video content natively within your existing learning and content management systems through a simple integration.
Warpwire’s video platform provides analytics to help you track media assets, media libraries, and system-wide usage. Designed to explore engagement, Warpwire’s reports provide deep insight into how your institution interacts with media.
To see how we can help you better leverage your video content, get in touch with us today!
