PlayPosit: Time-Saving Tips

What is PlayPosit? And what can PlayPosit do for you?

What is PlayPosit? PlayPosit is a video resource tool integrated with Canvas that allows instructors to create interactive videos. Using PlayPosit terminology, these videos are referred to as bulbs. Instructors can embed questions or other engagement check-points, called interactions, into recorded lecture videos, YouTube videos, or other Kaltura video recordings. For a more detailed summary of PlayPosit, please see this previous blog created by CATL.

What can PlayPosit do for you? PlayPosit can be used to create alternative learning materials for your course and offers more options besides traditional text-based resources for students to engage with.  Using bulb interactions, you can check student knowledge during a recorded lecture video, provide extra materials via external URL links to highlight a key learning point, provide space for students to anonymously ask clarifying questions, or even allow students to record time-stamped comments and notes for later review. A more detailed breakdown of the different types of interactions offered within PlayPosit bulbs as well as a few use cases like creating quizzes, breaking up long lectures, and much more can be found here.

Increasing Dialogue: How can PlayPosit help you collect student feedback?

Another powerful feature of this tool is that you can also use PlayPosit within your Canvas course to get live, synchronous feedback from your students. In the past, clickers or Kahoot! may have been used as live polling tools, or even Zoom Polls or Microsoft Teams. Now, you can use a similar feature included with UWGB’s PlayPosit license called PlayPosit Broadcast

If you do not wish to use PlayPosit Broadcast as a live polling feature, you can still increase course dialogue by utilizing the Discussion interaction within your bulbs. This type of interaction allows students to leave timestamped comments and questions within a video, creating a discussion forum within the PlayPosit activity itself. Instructors can modify the discussion forum interaction settings to prevent students from seeing their classmates’ comments until they have posted a comment themselves. You can also moderate discussion forum interactions as the instructor within the PlayPosit interface. Creating PlayPosit discussion forums for points may also offer students an alternative to traditional Canvas Discussions.  

Assignments and Beyond: How can PlayPosit be used for low-stakes or ungraded activities?

A common misconception about PlayPosit is that you can only create PlayPosit bulbs as graded Canvas Assignments. This is not the case. If you would like students to take a PlayPosit assessment or engage with an interactive video activity for points that are reflected within your Canvas gradebook, you can indeed build the PlayPosit bulb as an assignment within Canvas, however you can also build ungraded PlayPosit activities for your students. 

Student self-assessment activities and interactive, supplemental video resources can encourage active learning within the classroom, especially for asynchronous learning environments. Both types of student engagement activities can be created using PlayPosit, and may work best as low-stakes assignments or as ungraded items in Canvas. To create an ungraded PlayPosit bulb, add your PlayPosit bulb as an embedded item in a page or as an external tool within a Module. If you still want students to see some sort of grade for self-assessment purposes, you can assign each bulb interaction a point within the PlayPosit interface. While these interactions will display point values within PlayPosit, the points earned by completing interactions will not push back to Canvas and the PlayPosit activity will not be reflected in the Canvas Gradebook. More information on how to create PlayPosit activities that are graded or ungraded in Canvas can be found in the UWGB IT Knowledgebase, UKnowIt.

How can PlayPosit help save instructors time?

PlayPosit isn’t just a resource that will benefit your students and their learning experience within the classroom. It also has many benefits for instructors. There are several features of this tool that can be time savers for you as an instructor! Not only is building a PlayPosit bulb a quick way to enhance your existing course videos, but PlayPosit automatically saves interactions you make for your bulbs within a personal interaction library. PlayPosit also allows you to create templates for individual interactions or sets of interactions. You can then access these individual interactions, located under My Interactions within the PlayPosit interface, or your saved templates for use in future bulbs to make the bulb creation process even faster! For more information on how to access and use these timesaving PlayPosit features, see this PlayPosit resource. Remember, since UWGB possesses a license for this tool, you as an instructor have access to all of these features.  

Beyond saving the interactions and templates you personally create, PlayPosit also allows you to co-edit bulbs with colleagues using the collaborations feature, or to share out PlayPosit bulbs to fellow instructors by using the folders feature. These sharing features can be used together or separately depending on if you wish to include your colleagues as editors, or to simply provide them with a copy of one of your bulbs. For directions on how to share and copy bulbs, please review this PlayPosit resource. Not only can you share individual bulbs within PlayPosit, but you can also collaborate and share interaction templates with your colleagues! For more information on how to collaborate with other instructors, please see this resource provided by PlayPosit.

Questions?

These are only a few of the features PlayPosit offers instructors and students. If you have any questions about PlayPosit, please feel free to reach out to the UWGB Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning through email (catl@uwgb.edu) or for troubleshooting you can contact PlayPosit customer support through their website (PlayPosit Knowledge) by clicking on “Contact” in the upper right corner. For a more detailed discussion of PlayPosit use cases and how you can harness the tool in your own Canvas course, you can schedule a consultation with CATL here

Helpful Terms and Hints

Bulb – The term used to refer to a PlayPosit interactive video.

Interaction – The term for the different questions, images, audio, or other media resources which can be embedded into a PlayPosit bulb. There is no limit to how many can be included within a bulb.

PlayPosit Designer – This is the interface used to create PlayPosit bulbs, insert your video source, embed interactions, and select bulb settings.

PlayPosit 3.0 Designer – This refers to the current version of PlayPosit software being used.

Learner Made Content – This refers to PlayPosit bulbs and interactions created by learners and submitted for assessment to instructors.

If you do not wish to work in the PlayPosit interface within Canvas and prefer a larger screen to build and edit your videos, you can open your PlayPosit account in any browser. In order to do so however, you must have already opened PlayPosit within your UWGB Canvas account. If you have not yet accessed PlayPosit at UWGB, follow the instructions below. 

How to log into PlayPosit through your UWGB Canvas Account: 

  • First, log into your UWGB Canvas account in one tab of a browser of your choice. 
  • Navigate to the Assignments section if you wish to build a graded PlayPosit activity or to the Pages section for an ungraded PlayPosit activity. 
  • For a Page, create a New Page by clicking on + Page and then click the down arrow to the left of the plug-in icon in the Rich Content Toolbar. The plug-in icon looks like a two-prong plug with a cord. Then click on View All and select PlayPosit. This will open a window with the words Set Link in the top right corner. Click on the words Enter PlayPosit in the middle of the window or Set Link in green on the right side of the window. You should now be in PlayPosit, skip to the last step in these instructions to open PlayPosit in a browser. 
  • For an Assignment, create a New Assignment by clicking on + Assignment, then under Submission Type, select External Tool. Next, click on Find under "Find an External Tool URL" and scroll down then select PlayPosit. A window with the words Link Resource form External Tool will open, click on either Enter PlayPosit or Set Link in green. You should now be in PlayPosit, skip to the last step in these instructions to open PlayPosit in a browser. 
  • Now, in a separate tab in the same browser where you logged into Canvas, open PlayPosit Knowledge. Click on the PlayPosit logo in the upper right portion of the screen. The PlayPosit logo is the image of the dog. This will open your PlayPosit account provided by UWGB. Here you can build, share, and collaborate on bulbs using the larger screen view provided by the browser. To set the link to your desired bulb for a graded Assignment in Canvas or in a Canvas Page however, you should follow the instructions above to open PlayPosit in Canvas then select your bulb. 

Yes, in PlayPosit you can include several video segments into a single bulb. Do this in the Video Segments screen when creating a new bulb. If you would like to change the order of the video segments within your bulb, you can toggle on the Enable drag and drop recording option at the top of the Video Segments screen. Move videos into the order in which you would like them to be seen. Once you are finished, toggle off the Enable drag and drop recording.

Note: For new PlayPosit playlists, you should reorder your video segments before you add interactions. Interactions in a playlist will not move with the video when it is reordered. 

Yes, with the UWGB institutional license PlayPosit will automatically pull in caption files that are already associated with your videos (such as YouTube videos with captions or Kaltura videos. You can also upload caption files directly to PlayPosit such as .vtt and .srt files. 

To check your video for captions, navigate to the My Bulbs page in PlayPosit and follow the steps below. 

  • In the far right of the screen under Actions, click on the three vertical dots to the right of the video you wish to check and then from the dropdown menu select Edit. 

  • Click on the Video Segments tab in the PlayPosit Designer and click on the edit icon (it looks like a gray pencil) for the video you wish to caption. The edit icon is in the upper right corner of the video segment.  

  • Select Edit Video Segment from the options presented. Then click on the Captions tab in the Edit Video Segment screen. 

  • In this screen, you can now have PlayPosit search for available captions, or you can upload your caption file.  
  • To search for captions, click on the View Available YouTube Captions, then select from the available options PlayPosit was able to fetch by checking the box to the right of the desired language choice. Once your choices are finalized, select Download in the bottom right corner to save your choices. 

Evidence-Based Frameworks and Strategies for Keeping Students Engaged

Keeping students engaged in their learning throughout an entire semester is a challenge that exists across all disciplines and modalities. Though the ways in which you implement strategies for increasing student engagement might vary because of these factors, the good news is that the underlying principles remain the same. Below are some of the key methods and strategies that have emerged as common themes across many studies on the relationships between teaching practices and student engagement.

Foster a Culture of Growth, Trust, and Belonging

Part of a student’s engagement in a course is tied to the affective domain of learning, or a student’s thoughts and feelings about their own learning. Does the student feel like they belong in this learning environment? Are they respected by their peers and the instructor? Do they see their instructor as an ally in the learning journey, or as an adversary?

One aspect of the affective domain is whether an individual has a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. The Center for Learning Experimentation, Application and Research at the University of North Texas has a great list of growth mindset interventions instructors can implement. It is worth noting, however, that research seems to indicate the effectiveness of these interventions is contingent on the instructor’s mindset as well. Studies have shown that instructors with a greater growth mindset (as opposed to a fixed mindset) have smaller racial achievement gaps and inspire more student motivation in their courses.

The affective domain also includes students’ feelings of belonging and trust. While the degree to which you can affect these feelings has limitations, evidence-based practices usually boil down to how you interact with students and facilitate interactions between students. A few examples include using a welcoming tone in your syllabus, modelling inclusive language, and taking the time to get to know your students’ names. Even in asynchronous classes it is important to build trust with your students. For example, you might want to consider using a week-one survey to provide your students with an opportunity to tell you about themselves.

Break Up Lectures & Add Opportunities for Active Learning

When there is a lot of content that needs to be disseminated across the duration of the semester, lectures are a common method for communicating that information quickly and efficiently. But the longer and denser the lecture is, the more instructors risk losing their students along the way due to cognitive load.

One solution is to build pause points into your lectures. Students benefit from structured pauses during lectures as it allows them space to question, process, and reflect on the information that they’ve absorbed. For pre-recorded lectures, the same idea can be achieved by breaking up a long lecture video into multiple short, topical videos (research suggests 6-12 minutes is an ideal length for maintaining student engagement). Fortunately, Kaltura (My Media) makes it very easy to trim and save video clips from right within Canvas.

When adding pauses for students to digest information, it is also beneficial to create opportunities for active learning activities. These activities can be very brief, such as using an anonymous polling tool to check for student understanding during a lecture. For more in-depth active learning, consider making time for small group discussions, written reflections, and other exercises that require students to employ higher order thinking skills. For courses with an asynchronous component, PlayPosit allows instructors to add a variety of engagement activities to pre-recorded lecture videos, while Hypothesis may be useful for incorporating annotation and reflection activities into assigned readings.

Provide Transparency and Support

When a student needs to spend a lot of mental energy figuring out the logistics of how to complete an activity, they have less mental energy left to engage with the course materials themselves. Therefore, transparency and scaffolding are both key elements to designing engaging assignments.

The Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TiLT) framework is designed to help instructors write clear and descriptive instructions for learning materials and assignments. For this framework, lay out the task, purpose, and criteria for each learning activity. If a student knows what they are supposed to do, why they are supposed to do it (how it ties to the course learning outcomes), and how they are going to be assessed, they can go into the activity more confident in their ability to engage with it.

It is common for a student to stop engaging with a course if they feel like they don’t have the means or resources to complete the tasks they’ve been assigned. Proper instructional scaffolding can help counter this issue by bridging some of the cognitive gaps and reducing the number of students that fall through the cracks. For example, if the final assignment in your course is an 8-page research paper, consider breaking up the process into several smaller assignments, such as having students submit their topic, bibliography, and outline at various points throughout the semester. Other ways to provide scaffolding this assignment might include modelling (providing examples of papers that meet the outcomes of the assignment), incorporating instructor or peer feedback for the outline or an early draft of the paper, and providing a robust rubric to guide students on how to meet the assignment outcomes.

Additional Resources

Engaging students is a broad topic that we are only just able to scratch the surface of in this post. Below are some resources for further reading if you’d like to dive in deeper.

Questions?

As always, we welcome you to share your ideas for engaging students by dropping a comment below or emailing us at CATL@uwgb.edu. If you’d like to discuss any of these methods or ideas one-on-one, a CATL member would be happy to meet with you for a consultation as well.

Follow-Up: PlayPosit “Replicate and Repeat” Training

On Nov. 15, 2022, PlayPosit held a training that focused on how to replicate and repeat content in PlayPosit. These features can help create a more streamlined workflow for users that would like to reuse bulb content or share bulbs with other instructors. Some of the content covered in this training includes:

  • How to duplicate/copy a bulb
  • How to reuse an interaction (question, discussion, pause point, etc.) from a previous bulb
  • How to use PlayPosit interaction templates
  • How to save an interaction or a group of interactions as a template
  • How to share a bulb with a collaborator
  • How to send a copy of a bulb to another instructor

A recording of this training is embedded below.

Questions?

As you explore PlayPosit, we encourage you to consult PlayPosit’s extensive knowledgebase of instructor guides, including this guide on building graded bulbs in Canvas. You can contact PlayPosit support directly by clicking the “Contact” link on their support site and filling out their web form. Guides on how to build a bulb, share a bulb with your students, use PlayPosit for peer review, and more, can also be found on the UWGB IT knowledgebase. 

As always, we also welcome you to request a CATL consultation if you’d like to see a demo of PlayPosit or talk through how you might use it in your course!

Evidence-Based Approaches to Promoting Academic Honesty

Academic honesty has always been a concern in higher education, but the proliferation of technology has changed the scope and nature of the problem. Students have access to more electronic means to cheat, including AI-generated papers and websites that provide access to test bank questions and answers. Meanwhile, professors can deploy competing technologies designed to search automatically for plagiarized content, lock down browsers during exams, or remotely proctor test-taking.

It should come as no surprise that there are ethical concerns about both academic dishonesty itself and the privacy and intellectual property issues raised by technologies intended to detect or prevent it. In fact, one Canadian professor recently taught an academic course on cheating, and he is a co-investigator on a large-scale study of college student motivations to pay others to do their work.

The SoTL literature on this topic often lags behind the technological advances, but there are some recent studies instructors may find helpful. Duncan and Joyner (2022) surveyed students and TAs about digital proctoring, and although their sample was not representative, their resulting article is definitely worth a read. They provide a nice overview of costs of benefits of the practice, and they also effectively summarize the literature on alternative assessment strategies faculty can employ. Another recent addition to the body of knowledge on academic honesty is a study of six relatively low-tech and brief methods to reduce cheating, such as allowing students to withdraw assignments. Again, there are some methodological issues with the research, but instructors may find the techniques and review of past research on them illuminating.

The issue of academic integrity is complex, multi-faceted, and rapidly evolving given its intersection with emerging technology. Additional examples of relevant SoTL research on the topic are included below. CATL will update this list as we are able. Feel free to contact us with suggested resources as well.

Additional Resources

Resources for Incorporating Student Feedback

Blue note card with the word Feedback

Though further study is needed, research into the efficacy of regularly collecting and incorporating student feedback has indicated that it is a valuable practice for improving as educators (Mandouit, 2018). Instructors can use a variety of methods for gathering student feedback to shape and tune their instruction, from informal mid-semester surveys to a final course evaluation. This blog post is a collection of past resources that continue to hold up as helpful resources for instructors looking to integrate meaningful student feedback into their courses.  

Mid-Semester Feedback 

Collecting mid-semester feedback provides instructors with insights into how students are engaging in their courses and is a great opportunity to discover any areas for instructional improvement before end-of-semester evaluations. To help instructors incorporate mid-semester feedback in their courses, CATL created a blog post on collecting mid-semester feedback from students which includes student feedback survey examples that instructors can download and use in their Canvas course. Survey types include short surveys gauging students’ class preparations and experiences, start-stop-continue surveys, open-ended questions asking students what has helped or hindered their learning, and the Plus/Delta Survey that asks students to provide what they like in the course and what they would change.  

To see a demonstration on how to build a mid-semester survey in Canvas, view this short CATL video resource, TeAch Tuesday – Mid-Semester Evaluations. This video also dives into some best practices for mid-semester evaluations. For example, you might consider sharing with your students any trends you spotted in the feedback. This can help provide justification for certain aspects of your course that you plan on changing or keeping the same (e.g., “the majority of you asked for more review time, so I am going to build more time into our schedule before exams to review as a class.”). For an even deeper exploration of mid-semester evaluations, you can watch this PlayPosit bulb from a workshop CATL ran in 2021 on collecting and working with mid-semester feedback. Topics covered in the workshop include why instructors collect mid-semester feedback, approaches for enhancing the quality of feedback questions and responses, and a breakdown of different surveys and evaluations instructors can use.  

After you have collected your mid-semester feedback, you need to decide what to do and how to move forward with your students’ responses, which can often be the most difficult part. In addition to the CATL workshop linked above, the guide, What to Do with Mid-Semester Feedback, created by the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, is a great resource for thoughtful reflection on and implementation of student feedback. Their guide includes recommendations on how to include students in a discussion of the survey results, reflect on student comments, and use survey data to identify patterns in your instruction and students’ learning.  

End-of-Semester Course Evaluations 

Compared to mid-semester evaluations, end-of-semester student evaluations of instruction (commonly referred to as course evaluations) are a more formal method of collecting student feedback that also relies on standardized forms and questions. Still, it can be a useful tool for instructors to reflect on their teaching when given careful thought and consideration. Since Fall 2021, most programs have adopted a new, standardized student course evaluation form that was approved by UWGB Faculty Senate. Though the form is used for most instructional courses, your department may use its own form or evaluation process, so check with your department chair if you have questions. To help instructors explore and understand this new standardized form, CATL created a video overview of the new course evaluation form. 

Once students have submitted their final course evaluations, what can instructors do with the student feedback on their instruction? The video linked above on the new course eval form includes some practical advice on interpreting your student feedback. Some tips include looking for patterns and trends in the data, taking the feedback seriously, but not personally, and ignoring negative outliers. In general, most of the concepts in the Vanderbilt guide and CATL workshop recording on mid-semester feedback also apply, though in the case of course evals you will have to wait until the next iteration of your course and cohort of students to implement the feedback. 

We’d love to hear from you! 

Gathering and using feedback, whether it’s informally over the semester, at the mid-semester mark, or with an end-of-semester evaluation, can be a useful tool for developing your teaching and courses in a variety of ways. Let us know how you collect feedback and work it into your courses, and share your success, advice, and methods you’ve found most effective. Feel free to drop a public comment or email us at catl@uwgb.edu.  

If you would like to discuss more about how to collect and evaluate course feedback or how to use other methods of feedback and reflection in your instruction, please reach out to CATL to schedule a consultation!