Interactive Videos

Gone are the days where a learner would just passively consume elearning content thrown at him. Reason? He doesn’t have the time and the patience for it, so, he wants to squeeze in more of everything in the tidbits of time he has. And learning or elearning is no different. You see we know this! And we are ready for the ‘time-crunched-yet-all-inclusive’ learning trend. So, we bring to you the concept of interactive videos! These videos engage the audience in a dialogue. It invites them to listen and participate in the story, while allowing them to determine what happens next?

Interactive videos are born out of the pursuit to make elearning content consumption engaging. The concept is pretty neat – non-linear storytelling by the way of videos, where the viewer is required to complete each step before moving on. We are sure, this two-way storytelling-based method of elearning will not only make the learners lean forward, but they will likely spend more meaningful time in the learning process.

Videos can be made interaction rich by incorporating a wide variety of interactive elements directly in the video. Interactive aspects that can be added include hotspots, questions, calculations, lead generation forms and many more. So to say, any type of video can be made interactive, tailor made to the T, with almost limitless interactions plugged in. So, as the video plays, the added interactions keep appearing as hotspots on top of the video, while prompting a response from the viewer. If a response is not provided or is (in case of question) incorrect, the video won’t proceed. Hence, in interactive videos, user participation is a must.

The digital learners of the present day have their smartphones by their side all the time. The smartphone is interactive, the internet is interactive and so are the devices connected to it. Its obvious that the content he consumes be interactive as well. This digital learner of today will only be satisfied when he’ll get the opportunity to control his learning process. And this is made possible only with the advent of interactive content and that too made available on their preferred reading platform: mobile devices.

With the wealth of information available today, people are struggling to consume traditional content. As the information overload keeps burying the learner deep into the buzz of useless content, we’ve tried to provide a way where traditional passive content would be converted into an engaging and interesting experience. The immersive learning experience of interactive videos not only captures, but also keeps the audience’s attention in ways the usual traditional videos don’t always succeed in doing.

We reckon, making these videos would be as easy as undertaking a DIY craft project. Generally, no coding or programming skills are required to produce these skills. If you ask the LMS admin in charge of making these videos, he’d tell you that making interactive videos is cakewalk. Also, the simplest of the videos made can be just as powerful as the more complex variants.

Interactive videos engage the learners in real time. One more aspect of these videos is that the user participation that can be tracked in real time again. This is possible because the video won’t move ahead if the viewer does not answer the interactions present in the videos. As a result, the LMS admin gets to view and track, what part of the audience is at what stage in the learning process. Bottomline, the learner can’t simply play the video and go for a ride around the town. He has to stay there, else his curricula will never get completed.

Interactions in the form of questions/quiz can be thrown in at various points in the interactive videos. Questions asked could be stand-alone or they can be used in question sets, as multiple choice question sets. Besides, questions could be in the form of fill in the blanks, drag and drop, interactive summaries, mark the words and various other drag and drop text. For answering the questions, the LMS admin can add as many answering options as per the requirement.

This feature empowers the instructional designers and training managers to discover new insights by delving deeper into the learner’s data. The reporting and analytics provision is unique, revolutionary, simple to use and something that’s never been seen in an LMS before! The training managers will bless us for making easy reporting a snap for the entire learning organization.

Bookmarking helps you directly jump to a particular point in the interactive video. It acts as a table of contents that can be used to jump back and forth on topics. This helps you sort through videos, and set points that will lead you to the specific section directly. To open the bookmark, you can click on the bookmark icon next to the play button, or drag the navigation bar to the specific time or point created, and you are sorted!

This feature allows the learner to dynamically zoom / scale up on images when clicked. Let’s take the example of a mechanical engineering student who wants to look at a particular machinery in detail. When this feature is applied, the interactive video stops at that image, allowing the learner to hover or click on a particular part of the image so that it zooms out. This helps the learner have a look at the important details that are too small to view at the slide size.

There is a provision to add a summary statement, that would be seen as a pop up, at the end of every interactive video. You can also decide the time at which you want to insert the summary statement i.e. number of seconds before the video ends. This feature proves to be of great use when the learner has to quickly revise the key aspects that contain the essence of the video. It helps the learner reflect on the learning content presented in the video.

There are a hoard of drag and drop features that make interactive aspects simple to use. To cite a few examples, the interactive aspects include the option to add labels, texts, tables, links, images, statements, fill in the blanks, single and multiple choice answer sets. Every little aspect of the interactive aspects can be modified according to your requirements. These drag and drop features pop up as clickable hot spots on the interactive video and are also seen as red or blue dots on the timeline of the video.

Also known as summary feedback, this feature helps in displaying the final score of the learner at the end of the video. Via score, it shows the percentage of correct answers a learner could crack while viewing an interactive video. This feature helps in gauging the level to which a learner has understood a topic.

Besides the one stated above, there are many other interactions that can be added. Right from giving a custom title to the video to custom selecting a poster image and many more. You get a myriad of edit setting options. After you are done with the custom settings, there is also an option to ‘preview’ the interactive video. These customizations help the admin better the video-viewing experience for the users, while the users get a truly immersive video-watching experience.

We support embedding of YouTube, Vimeo, MP4 video sources for interactive videos. Besides these, if there are any other particular video hosting provider that you have in mind, you can contact us and we’ll get the video embedded from that particular video hosting provider embedded in the LMS for you. Also, there is a feature where you don’t need to re-embed the video into the course, even if interactions get edited or added at a later stage. This remains applicable for all the video formats.

Once your content rich interactive video is ready, you can use it for the learners in places where you would use a regular video. It basically helps in increasing the engagement levels of learners by making the video-watching experience more immersive. The best part, these videos are customized to the user’s particular preferences.