Have you ever caught yourself thinking “Quizzes are so boring! And if they are boring for me, what about my students?”

If so, video quizzes may be what you’re looking for!  They can help you vary the basic question format, target higher level learning and reinforce your formative assessment options.

What are Video Quizzes?

They are videos with questions and interactions with content embedded within the video experience itself.  VIU supports two distinct technologies that can do this:  VIUTube and H5P.

In VIUTube, you can place various kinds of question at specific spots within the video: multiple choice; true/false options; reflection points (video is paused and combined with text) and open-ended questions where students can answer with their own words. These functions allow your students to think about particular topics as they are watching and give them the opportunity to answer questions about important points as they go along. It’s a great way to get students to think through a video, rather than just passively watch it. VIUtube gives you lots of flexibility in how the students will navigate the video: you can let them repeat questions, skip around, get hints, change their answers, reflect on their thinking, and confirm the right answer.  

H5P is an html-based software that can do many of the same things as VIUtube but is even more flexible.  For example, it makes it possible to place a pop-up right on a specific part of the video picture. When a student clicks on the pop up, the video stops to let them think about the question or activity you have designed for them.  They can answer a question, check their thinking, revise an answer, be sent back to review a previous part of the video until they get the answer right, choose additional links for more information or take a final quiz.  Like VIUTube, H5P is easy to integrate into your VIULearn course.

Why should I use Formative Video Quizzes?

The obvious answer is that they are more engaging because you can vary the format and context of your questions; they make examples more realistic; create an experience of the content that allows students to use multiple senses and learning preferences; and allow you to target different levels of thinking.

But the deeper and even more impactful reason is that video quizzes create opportunities for deeper learning through immediate formative feedback that leads to self assessment.

Why is immediate feedback so important? When students experience a video quiz, they get immediate feedback to their answers and can easily see for themselves where they still need to improve. The immediacy of feedback is important to create a learning mindset because it tells the student how well they are doing while they still have their mind on the topic.  When there is temporal disconnect between the students’ cognitive engagement with the material and the feedback they receive, the engagement with the feedback itself changes significantly. Because the experience of the feedback is divorced from the experience of the learning, students now focus on the ‘rightness’ or the ‘wrongness’ of their answer rather than on their process of learning. 

Why do these quizzes work best as formative rather than summative assessment?  The immediate feedback creates the conditions for self-assessment. Self-assessment is one of the most powerful ways to learn because the learning is self-actualized: students are not ‘learning for the teacher’ but seeing for themselves where they are getting it right and where they still need to review. As soon as a quiz carries a mark for correct and incorrect answers (summative assessment), students change their mindset around the learning they are doing:  now it is about ‘being right’ and fearing ‘being wrong’ rather than engaging in the process of learning and having the opportunity to learn from mistakes.

And finally, formative video quizzes are an excellent way to enhance collaboration among students.  It does not matter if they are doing this alone or doing it with a friend: Either way they are learning!

When do I use Video Quizzes?

Video quizzes work well for many kinds of topics.

Learning a process: Any topic where it is important for students to be able to use a specific process, or where things have to happen in a specific order for results to come out right are a good target for a video quiz.  Examples might include:

• Nursing: preparing a client for surgery
• Chemistry: setting up an experiment properly
• Baking: making focaccia
• Research methods: planning a study to answer a specific research question
• Welding: repairing a metal joint
• Social work: documenting an investigation that can result in support services for an individual or a family

Modeling Skills:  a video quiz is useful when a physical skill needs to be modeled.  You can create a video that shows the correct way to do something and ask questions.  Or present an incorrect way to do it with a question that asks students to analyze and critique the performance; or a scenario with both correct and incorrect actions where students must predict the consequences, troubleshoot consequences, or recommend better ways forward.

Problem-solving: Videos are a great way to present a scenario where students can answer higher level thinking questions such as what will happen next? How did situation this come to be?  If you were making a decision in this situation, what would be the logical solution or conclusion? How could you avoid the problems in this situation in the first place?

Interpretation of technical data: For many disciplines the challenge is to teach students how to read, interpret and use technical data effectively.  Whether you teach Geology, Accounting, Nursing, Statistics or are preparing Electricians, your students need to be able to read the kinds of data you use in your field and draw appropriate conclusions from those data.  Video quizzes are an excellent way to integrate reading, interpretation, and evaluation. 

As you can see from the above list of uses for video quizzes, they allow for many different levels of thinking:

• Factual knowledge: What is this? How does this work?
• Prediction: What will be the consequences of …? 
• Recommendation: What was biggest mistake? What is your top suggestion for improvement? What should happen next? What should have been done in the first place?
• Interpretation: what does this data mean?  How did this situation come about? Why does it matter?
• D
• Evaluation: What’s the most important part of this process?

Try Video Quizzes for Formative Assessment!

They are a great way to let students test their own knowledge, to help them drill down to the most important points of the content being shared, and to create opportunities for higher level thinking around the most important content of your course.

Have Questions?

The staff at CIEL would be happy to chat with you about using video quizzes for formative assessment or walk you through how to set up your first video quiz. To ask a question or schedule a consultation, please email learnsupport@viu.ca or call us at 250-740-6179.