Many of us live in countries who use holidays to celebrate historic or religious events; think Diwali, Thanksgiving, Eid al-Fitr, ANZAC day and the Queen’s birthday.

But, what if, like Marcie Connor, Coordinator for Animal Studies and RSPCA at Box Hill Institute, you also have a cohort of students with a scheduled class on that day of the week. She’s teaching two cohorts of students for the same course; one who have chosen to study on a Thursday and the other on a Monday. And this semester there are five holidays falling on a Monday, equating to 15% of the course.

The good news is that both groups successfully learn the same amount of content while Marcie enjoys her holiday with her family. She’s managed to achieve this success by creating a self-paced page for ‘Monday students’ in the learning management system (LMS) so that the content is available whenever and wherever students are ready for it. As Marcie puts it, “I’ve figured out how to be in two places at once.”

Interactive Media Increases Engagement in Self-Paced Learning

Over the course of the semester, Marcie has been recording short tutorial video content for her students as they learn new skills. Through her short videos, she knows the students always have exemplars with the correct content they can refer to. Not only can she break the skills down into manageable steps, the videos also offer a demonstration of the complete skill in action to show students what they should strive for with live animals.

Because Marcie already creates short tutorial videos to assist her students in their learning, she has much of the content she needs at her fingertips when she turns it into a self-paced course. Adding polls to the videos to create interactive media in her embedded content has allowed opportunities for students to engage and feel like they are “doing” in what risks being a static and dull learning environment.

“I’ve begun to rely really heavily on the Echo360 easy-embed feature. It integrates the video directly into the LMS page in a way that makes it simple for me to make a space for my students that minimizes any distractions and feelings of being overwhelmed. My content looks more approachable because it blocks out the noise that can be present in an LMS.”

A successful strategy Marcie has used with students has been to create bite-sized video content that involves a problem-solving response poll in the video. To maintain her connection with her students Marcie also features in the videos conducting the demonstration. One example shows footage of a dog lying on a table as a veterninary nurse counts the number of breaths over 15 seconds. Marcie then asks the question to the camera, ‘how many would that be in one minute?’ The video stops and the gated interactive media question asks students to calculate the heart rate and students receive automated feedback once they submit.

Once Marcie is back to her teaching duties, she gets an overview of student engagement with the click of a button. The analytics button incorporated into the media player opens directly to show media views and polling responses for both the class and the individual students, giving Marcie immediate feedback as she prepares for her next class.

Watch the video below to see and hear Marcie talk about her LMS page:

 

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