Video is becoming more widely used in education [1], particularly in online courses and in flipped classrooms. Instructors often create short videos to explain specific topics to students. Best practices in the area of assessment would necessitate some kind of quiz or comprehension check before moving on after watching the video, such as a Blackboard quiz placed immediately after the video.

But how can we be sure that students watch the videos intently? What if the quiz could live inside of the video, with the questions immediate and contextualized? Kaltura Video Quizzes allow you to do this, and is available to all UAF affiliates as part of Kaltura Mediaspace, which can be accessed at media.uaf.edu.

A well implemented video quiz is innovative on a few fronts. It’s both a form of microlearning and low-stakes summative assessment. That is, making sure students grasp a concept right then and there, before moving on, but without a significant effect on their grade. In a video quiz, the questions should not be difficult, but answerable by the average viewer who is paying attention. The quiz questions should also be appropriately placed throughout the video at salient points.

Teresa Lantz, UAF Assistant Professor, Process Technology, has begun developing video quizzes for use in PRT 140: Industrial Process Instrumentation I. In one example, Lantz uses a screencast and two quiz questions to explain hydrostatic head calculations. Not only is her explanation concise and enthusiastic, the quiz questions do a good job of focusing student attention on active thinking, rather than passively watching. Watch it here: PRT 140: Hydrostatic Head Calculations – Quiz (UA login required).

The ability to create pause points for reflection is a major affordance of a video quiz. The questions themselves need not be difficult. Basic comprehension checks are fine. Even a question at the very beginning  asking how students are feeling about the topic can focus their attention on the viewing experience ahead.

To  create a video quiz, you need a video already in your My Media that youeither own or can edit. In the top right drop down menu, select “Video Quiz’ and on the following page, select the video that you want to turn into a quiz. The following page is the Quiz Editor. You can give the quiz a new name and add a welcome message and customize the initial instructions or “in-video tip.’

What can you do with this tool?

• Provide contextual hints to students who miss a question.
• Give an explanation for why the correct answer is so.
• Generate a pre-quiz PDF of the questions featured in the quiz.
• Allow or disallow students to be able to edit answers.
• Enable or disable the ability to skip questions.
• Disallow students from skipping ahead in the video.
• Hide or show their scores at the end.

Update 4/24/2019: Kaltura has released an update for the video quiz functionality. There are now four question types: multiple choice, true/false, open answer, and reflection point. Kaltura quizzes also do now integrate natively with the Blackboard gradebook.

Kaltura Video quizzes lack a few features. It is limited to one question type – multiple choice with only four possible answers. Students can only select one answer. This limits the range of questioning that can occur. They also do not currently integrate with Blackboard gradebook. However, you can access  analytics within Mediaspace that show you viewer data and quiz question results, as well as .csv files for managing data locally.

Interested in learning more about Kaltura? See our other teaching tips on Kaltura MediaSpace here: https://ctl.uaf.edu/tag/kaltura/

See the PDF for this Teaching Tip.

Reference

[1]  Hansch, A., Hillers, L., McConachie, K., Newman, C., Schildhauer, T., & Schmidt, P. (2015).  Video and online learning: Critical reflections and findings from the field.