Last updated on June 4, 2024
Lecturing in class is a live performance. With your students in front of you, you can immediately gauge their understanding of the material by asking them questions or pausing to give them time to reflect. The feedback from students to the instructor, and vice versa, is a valuable part of ensuring learner comprehension.
But, how do we replicate this experience in an online environment? The video lecture is a staple tool in the online teaching repertoire. It personalizes you in the class and mimics a student’s experience in a traditional classroom setting, especially when you’re on camera. However, it misses one of the most essential components: the ability to make students active participants in the learning experience rather than a passive audience. This lack of interactivity is a critical weakness, but one that can be addressed by using video quizzes.
A video quiz is any video content that incorporates assessment questions at key points. This prompts students to immediately apply the knowledge they’re receiving, reinforcing it or exposing gaps in their understanding. This immediate feedback on their comprehension of the material, as it unfolds, can increase its effectiveness by prompting students to rewatch parts they didn’t understand.
Contents
Let’s walk through it together
Best Practices
What does a video quiz add to my class?
- Interactivity – video quizzes are much more effective at engaging the audience since they require active participation. Students can more easily lose focus on a video lecture compared to a face-to-face lecture and video quizzes can pull them back in.
- Reinforcement – Students can reflect on what they’re learning when presented with questions about the material. This builds confidence in their understanding of the material and reveals deficiencies in what they missed.
- Preparation – You can preview questions that will be coming in future assessments to students to encourage better results when summative assessment occurs.
- Multimedia – The unique value of multimedia content for learning is well demonstrated, and video quizzes let you leverage that value in summative assessments as well as activities.
When should I use video quizzes?
- Whenever you provide a lecture or any other kind of lengthy video content, students will benefit from brief, occasional assessments of their understanding. Here are a few examples of effective video quizzes:
- A fifteen-minute lecture has been chunked into five-minute segments, with a question at the end of each segment. This routine prompting of student interaction can pull their attention back to the material.
- An hour-long documentary has questions occasionally inserted after an expert interview portion, emphasizing the main point of what they said. Student comprehension of the content is tested, and they can rewatch certain portions quickly to pick up what they missed.
- The video quiz is used as a summative assessment, such as a conversation in a foreign language. Students are periodically prompted to identify vocabulary words in the speech. The multimedia benefits of audio-visual content are uniquely well-suited to such disciplines.
What should I keep in mind when creating video quizzes?
- When creating any kind of multimedia content, you should be aware of and implement important multimedia principles for instructional media. You can learn more about these in our Create Presentations Using Multimedia Principles spotlight.
- When creating multimedia content or sourcing existing content for use in a video quiz, be mindful of natural points for interruption that won’t break the natural flow of the content. For example, consider adding a question just before switching to a new slide in a lecture presentation or at a scene break in a film or documentary. The goal is to create manageable chunks of material for students to reflect on when answering questions.
- In lectures, make sure there’s a happy balance between content and questions. A question every three to five minutes is a comfortable interval in most cases. Too frequent interruptions will disrupt the students’ engagement with the material, but too few might allow the students’ attention to wander.
- The Yuja video platform provides a useful system for creating and delivering video quizzes, including auto-generated closed captions and synchronization with the Canvas gradebook.
- There is a sample video quiz made in Yuja below if you’d like to see the student experience for yourself.