PlayPosit Introduction and Overview

A blue, white, and black logo with a Dachshund dog and the word "PlayPosit"

The PlayPosit logo; in written copy, PlayPosit is written with no spaces and both “p’s” capitalized.

What is PlayPosit? 

PlayPosit is a platform for building and viewing interactive video content. With PlayPosit, learners are invited to engage in interactions at various points throughout a video. These interactions can be simple or complex, and graded or ungraded. PlayPosit’s uses are broad and varied, but one thing they all have in common is that they can help increase the engagement and attentiveness of learners, particularly in asynchronous environments.

An interactive video built with PlayPosit is called a “bulb.” A bulb is made up of a video or series of videos and a set of timestamped interaction points. When building a bulb, you can import videos from YouTube, Kaltura (My Media), and Vimeo, and then arrange and trim the clips as necessary. After that step, you pick points on the timeline to add interactions—multiple choice questions, polls, reflective pause points, and more—and then determine other important settings, like whether the interactions will be worth points or whether students can attempt a bulb multiple times.

The first tab of the PlayPosit bulb video builder, "Video Source." The dropdown menu is set to "Kaltura" and underneath are the first two video listings from a Kaltura video gallery
When building a PlayPosit bulb, you can pull in videos right from your Kaltura (My Media) library, such as lectures recorded with Kaltura Capture.

When a viewer watches a PlayPosit bulb, the video clips play until the player reaches the first interaction point on the timeline. Though it depends on the bulb’s settings, generally video playback will pause at an interaction point and a menu will pop up, asking the viewer to answer a question, complete an activity, or engage with an external resource. After doing so, the viewer can click “continue” and then proceed with the video until the next interaction, and so on, until they reach the end of the PlayPosit bulb.

The PlayPosit video player; on the left is a menu bar, and on the bottom a playback bar. In the middle there is the video and a pop-up menu with a true or false question.
An example of what the PlayPosit player looks like from a learner’s perspective. In this scenario, the student submitted the incorrect answer to a true/false question presented at the end of the video. As in this example, you can add automatic feedback for a correct or incorrect answer when building a PlayPosit interaction.

PlayPosit Canvas Integration

PlayPosit at UWGB is integrated with Canvas, and instructors can build and assign bulbs directly within their Canvas courses. Instructors can add bulbs to their Canvas course as either graded or ungraded activities: 

  • Instructors can build and assign graded PlayPosit bulbs within Canvas assignments that sync with the Canvas gradebook. 
  • Instructors can build and add ungraded PlayPosit bulbs to their course by embedding a bulb in a page with the Rich Content Editor or adding a bulb as an external tool link in a module. 

Graded Bulbs 

Graded bulbs are bulbs that are tied to the Canvas gradebook. Graded bulbs can contain both automatically graded interaction types like multiple choice questions and manually graded interaction types like free response. To create a graded bulb, you will create a Canvas assignment and then select “PlayPosit” from the “External Tool” submission options. You can read this knowledgebase article to learn more about how to create graded bulbs.

The "submission type" dropdown menu and settings in a Canvas assignment
You will find PlayPosit as an option in the “External Tool” submission type in Canvas assignments.

For a graded PlayPosit assignment, a student’s score in the Canvas gradebook is calculated by applying the percentage of points earned out of points possible in the bulb to the total points the assignment is worth in Canvas. For example, let’s say you create a Canvas assignment worth ten points and link a PlayPosit blub within that assignment which contains two questions worth a point each. A student who answers one out of two questions correctly would earn 1 out of 2 possible points in the bulb (50%), which would translate to a score of 5 out of 10 (50%) in the Canvas gradebook. 

Ungraded Bulbs 

Ungraded bulbs are completely independent from the Canvas gradebook. While they can still have interactions that are worth points in PlayPosit, these points are not tied to any gradebook item in Canvas. For ungraded bulbs, points and grades are only there for the learner to check and assess their own understanding. If you wish to add an ungraded bulb to your course, you can either add it to a module as an item or embed it with the Rich Content Editor (the editor found in Canvas pages, discussions, etc.).

A Canvas module titled "PlayPosit Demo Jan 22" with an external link item underneath labelled "Stopping a Kaltura Classroom Stream Early"
One advantage of the PlayPosit Canvas integration is that learners can complete PlayPosit activities without going to an external site. For example, this PlayPosit bulb linked in a module will open in Canvas when a user clicks on it (unless the “Load in a New Tab” box was checked when adding the link).

Types of Interactions

PlayPosit has eight main types of interactions. Each type of interaction is either auto-graded, manually graded, or ungraded by default. For graded interactions, keep in mind that the points only impact students’ grades in Canvas if the bulb is added to the course as a Canvas assignment. Below are the types of PlayPosit interactions. You can also read descriptions of the interaction types in this PlayPosit guide.

The menu for inserting an interaction in PlayPosit. Questions: multiple choice, check all, free response, fill in the blank, poll, discussion. Annotations: pause, web embed. Templates: my interactions, vocabulary matching. At the bottom is a button that says "more options below."
PlayPosit’s interaction menu also includes the option to use a template for building an interaction. Templates still use one of the eight interaction types but have pre-sets for common question styles. For example, the vocabulary matching template makes use of the “fill in the blank” interaction type.

Auto-Graded Interactions 

Auto-graded interactions are graded by PlayPosit. When you create one of the interactions below, you will be asked to provide the correct answer(s) for auto-grading. These interactions can also be set to “0 points” if you wish for them to not count toward a student’s score. 

  • Multiple choice 
  • Check all 
  • Fill in the blank 

Manually Graded Interactions 

Manually graded interactions require the instructor to read students’ submissions and then assign a grade. These interactions can also be set to “0 points” if you wish for them to be ungraded. 

  • Free response 

Ungraded Interactions 

Ungraded interactions are not scored and therefore are set to “0 points.” You can assign points to these interactions if you choose, in which case PlayPosit will award full points for completing the interaction (clicking “continue” for a pause or web embed, or submitting a response for a poll or discussion). 

  • Pause 
  • Web embed 
  • Poll 
  • Discussion
The grading view in PlayPosit. At the top is the question and the student's response. Below that is a bar to select the number of points to award, and a text box for entering feedback. At the very bottom is a "Submit" button.
When reviewing a student’s PlayPosit submission, you can change the points they received for an interaction and in some cases, like free response interactions, leave feedback.

Questions? 

As you explore PlayPosit, we encourage you to consult PlayPosit’s extensive knowledgebase of instructor guides, including this guide for Canvas users. You can contact PlayPosit support directly by clicking the “Contact” link on their support site and filling out their web form. PlayPosit also offers live trainings, webinars, and office hours. If you are interested in any of these vendor-led training opportunities, contact dle@uwgb.edu to learn more. 

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. 

 

Using Zoom for Facilitating Small Group Activities

Small group activities are a key part of face-to-face learning, but they are also particularly useful in virtual classroom learning environments. Many active learning activities like think-pair-share and collaborative document annotation work well in Zoom using a feature called breakout rooms.  

Breakout Rooms Overview 

The Breakout Rooms button on the Zoom controls toolbar
The Breakout Rooms button in the Zoom meeting toolbar. If you don’t see this button, click the three dots (…) on the right side of the toolbar and then select “Breakout Rooms” from the options.

Breakout rooms are used to split Zoom participants into smaller groups and place them in separate sessions where they can only hear and see their fellow group members until they return to the main room. During this time you could have students discuss a question, brainstorm solutions to a problem, or read an article with their small group. As the host, you can join and leave any of the breakout rooms as you please, which may be useful for checking how students are doing or clearing up any questions the group may have. 

Like any small group activity, breakout rooms work best when they have a clear purpose. Before you consider using breakout rooms in your virtual class sessions, consider the intention of the activity. Provide your students with clear instructions on what they are supposed to do during their breakout group time. It might be helpful to give students a concrete goal for their discussions as well. For example, you could have the groups nominate a notetaker to jot down important points from their conversation and then verbally summarize their group’s discussion when they return to the main room with the entire class.  

Creating Breakout Rooms 

Once you have decided on how you want to conduct your group activity, you can use that information to inform what settings you’d like to use for breakout rooms. First, you will want to learn about the basics of creating and managing Zoom breakout rooms. You have three main options for assigning students to breakout rooms:  

  • You can manually assign students to breakout rooms. 
  • You can automatically (randomly) assign students to breakout rooms based on the number of rooms you want (Zoom will show you how many participants per room in the bottom left corner of the pop-up window). 
  • You can let students choose which breakout room they want to join.  
"Create Breakout Rooms" pop-up menu
The pop-up window you see after clicking on the “Breakout Rooms” button, along with the three options for assigning participants.

Once you have selected which method you will use to assign students to their breakout rooms, you can click the blue “Create” button in the bottom-right corner of the pop-up window. This will set up your breakout rooms, but it will not start them yet. 

If you are using Zoom’s default settings for breakout rooms, you can click “Open All Rooms” to start the breakout rooms. Once you are ready for your students to return to the main room, simply click the red “Close All Rooms” button.  

Breakout Room Options and Features 

The breakout rooms "Options" pop-up menu
Clicking on the word “Options” in the breakout room menu will provide you more settings to customize your breakout rooms.

Zoom has a variety of features and options for breakout rooms. In this guide, we will include a few that are particularly useful for facilitating group activities. You can adjust breakout room settings before you open the rooms or even while the rooms are open.  

To open the breakout room options, click the word “Options” (or the gear icon on Mac) in the bottom-left corner of the breakout rooms menu. The first option, “Allow participants to choose room” will let students move between rooms, despite their original room assignment. The second setting, “allow participants to return to the main session at any time”, allows students to rejoin the main room where you, the host, will be unless you are visiting a breakout room. This could be useful if students need to “pop in” and ask you a question. If the third box is unchecked, students will be prompted to move to their assigned room once you open breakout rooms. If you would like students to be moved to breakout rooms automatically, you can check the third box. 

"Broadcast Message to All" pop-up text box
You can send all breakout rooms a message in chat with the “Broadcast Message to All” button.

Once your breakout rooms are open, it may be useful to provide your students with additional reminders or instructions. You can use the “Broadcast Message to All” button at the bottom of the breakout room menu to send a message to all groups, such as a warning on how much time they have left to discuss.  

You can also set a countdown timer from the breakout room settings. By default, when you close breakout rooms participants will see a 60-second countdown in which they will be prompted to move back to the main room. At the end of the minute, any remaining participants will be moved back to the main room automatically. You can adjust or eliminate this countdown from the breakout room settings as well. 

If you plan on using breakout rooms multiple times throughout a session, you can re-open the rooms at any time by clicking on the “Breakout Rooms” button in the toolbar and then the “Open All Rooms” button. This will put students back in the same breakout groups as before. If you wish to create new breakout groups (either of a different size or just to have students work with new peers), click the button that says “Recreate” instead. This will let you set the parameters for a new set of breakout rooms. 

Questions? 

For most technical questions, please contact Zoom support or the UWGB Help Desk. If your questions pertain to the Zoom Canvas integration, your best point of contact is dle@uwgb.edu. Lastly, if you have general questions about how you can use Zoom to support your teaching, we always welcome you to email the CATL inbox (catl@uwgb.edu) or schedule a consultation with a CATL member. The best way to become familiar with breakout rooms is to practice, so grab a few fellow instructors and give it a go, or set up a consultation with CATL where we can act as your pretend students. 

Collaborative Learning Assignments

A lot of students shudder at the thought of group assignments, and with good reason. A poorly-designed group assignment can be painful for the students involved and for the instructor. That being said, well-designed and properly scaffolded group activities have numerous positive effects on student learning. In a quality collaborative learning activity, students develop a deeper student understanding of course content as they learn from and teach their peers. Additionally, these activities can foster a sense of community between students and make academic dishonesty much less likely, as the group setting adds a built-in network of accountability. In terms of academic rigor, group assignments don’t necessarily need to be easier than individual exercises, but students shouldn’t be unequally yoked when they work collaboratively. One way to circumvent this issue is to have teams develop a group charter, like this example group charter (Word document) created by Kate Farley (UWGB) in which students decide on their roles and commitments before beginning a project.

UW-Extension has created a helpful guide that provides more detailed suggestions on how to design group activities, which are summarized below:

  1. Provide purpose. Make sure students know why they are doing the project and why it’s important that they work in groups.
  2. Provide support. Make sure students have the tools they need (technological and otherwise) to complete the project.
  3. Set ground rules with clearly defined milestones and timelines. If you allow students to create the ground rules and milestones for their own group, they are more likely to take ownership of the project and ensure the schedule is doable for them.
  4. Provide opportunities for peer and self-evaluation: Evaluation and reflection helps students effectively hold themselves and each other accountable for the results of their collaboration.

If you’re familiar with the concept these features might sound an awful lot like the teaching with transparency framework. If that concept is unfamiliar to you, you can learn more about it here.

Alternative Forms of Grading

Many instructors and educational developers have begun giving new consideration to specifications grading, contract grading and/or labor-based grading and how they may help support more equitable assessments and grading policies. One potential benefit to these approaches is that it allows instructors to maintain a series of low-stakes assessments without overburdening students with criteria-heavy weekly assignments that can feel like “busy-work.”

In Specs- and labor-based grading, you can retain well-aligned formative assessments and activities, but alleviate some of the anxiety that these may provoke amongst students (e.g., their focus is on the outcome versus their grade)—particularly if you provide students some choice in which assessments students may complete or revise.

In his book on contract grading, Asao B. Inoue argues that labor-based grading contracts support anti-racist and social justice-oriented assessment that enhance equity in the writing classroom. Other scholars have made similar arguments about contract-based and specifications grading, all of which provide more agency to students and remove the emphasis on “grading” and “grades.”  Though there are some differences between these approaches, we encourage you to worry less about those, and focus more on whether there are elements to these approaches to grading that may work well for your class. Here are some of the core elements of “ungrading” that you may wish to consider:

  • Assignments and activities are all graded as satisfactory/unsatisfactory (or acceptable/not yet, etc.).
    • Instructors provide very transparent about what constitutes acceptable work for each assignment. In labor-based grading systems, effort is central; for specifications grading, instructors often use standards that align with work that might garner a “B” in traditional schemas.
  • Students are allowed to revise unacceptable work at least once.
  • Students have some agency or choice in the assessments/assignments they complete for the course or even for each unit/module. “Bundles” of assessments and/or grading contracts are still linked to learning outcomes.

If you’re intrigued by the possibilities offered by these approaches to grading, consider reading a bit more about each before you make a decision. Check out this presentation from UNC Wilmington’s CTE for a brief overview of these alternative grading formats.

Created by: Virginia M. Schwarz

Questions for Critiquing

  1. What course is the contract for? Are the decisions appropriate for that context, audience, purpose?
  2. How might teacher identity and identities of students impact contract grading?
  3. What assignments, behaviors, and/or labor requirements are included in the tiers?
  4. Thinking in terms of importance (essential vs optional), do you agree with placement on those tiers?
  5. Build up? (C start) or Begin high? (A start) What are the benefits of each?
  6. Is this contract negotiated with students?
  7. Is peer review and self-assessment discussed?
  8. How does the instructor present/ explain this to students, if at all?
  9. Does this contract appear to be embedded into the culture and/or assignments of the course? In what ways does this respond to a larger teaching philosophy?
  10. Is “rigor” addressed? If so, how?
  11. Is student labor on assignments accounted for? (see Asao Inoue)
  12. What are the choices in length, tone, language, naming?
  13. What design choices did the teacher make? (for example, is the contract part of the syllabus)
  14. What degree of flexibility do you perceive, and are “violations/ negotiations/ surprises” addressed?
  15. How does/doesn’t this contract address the needs of traditionally high-achieving and low-achieving students according to your perception?
  16. How might the contract potentially further the working relationship with students? Students relationships to one another?
  17. How does the contract make you feel?

Questions for Composing

  1. What are the goals and outcomes of the course?
  2. How might I/ we account for teacher and student identity?
  3. What assignments, behaviors, and/or labor requirements actually help students learn and how are those incorporated into the class? [defamiliarize learning]
  4. Which of those are absolutely essential and what could be optional? [for making tiers or designing optional projects]
  5. Build up? (C start) or Begin high? (A start)
  6. Am I ready to negotiate this contract with students?
  7. How might I incorporate peer and self-assessment (process steps)?
  8. How do I plan to present/ explain this to students (and colleagues, and admin)?
  9. How do I plan to embed this in our classroom/ program culture? In what ways does this respond to a larger philosophy?
  10. How do I talk about “rigor”—do I even include that in my rationale?
  11. Do I account for student labor and if so then how? (see Asao Inoue)
  12. What should I do in terms of length, tone, language for the syllabus/ contract?
  13. What design choices did the teacher make? (for example, is the contract part of the syllabus)
  14. What degree of flexibility should I offer, and should I discuss violations, incorporate negotiations?
  15. How does/doesn’t this contract address the needs of all students?
  16. How does the contract potentially further my working relationship with students? Students relationships to one another?
  17. How do I hope students feel after reading?

Don’t Let the Canvas Gradebook Stop You

As you contemplate each of these approaches, CATL can help you deal with navigating the Gradebook so that doesn’t hold you or your students back should you wish to use a form of labor-based, specs, or contract grading.

Schedule a CATL consultation on alternative forms of grading.

Exam Wrappers

An exam wrapper is a way for students to reflect on their experience on an exam. It is meant for learners to look again at the techniques they use to get ready for an exam, identify strategies they can use to prepare for later assessments, and consider how similar strategies might help them in their studies in and beyond your course.

Sometimes also called “exam debriefs,” these follow-up reflection activities are often called “exam wrappers” because they serve as a wrap-up for the work done on an exam. They’re also meant for students to further articulate context and relevance for what the exam covered—’wrapping’ some additional meaning around the work they’ve done.

Exam wrappers largely attempt to get at (and point students toward reflecting on) the following:

  • The amount of time and effort put into studying
  • Study habits used
  • Whether students engage with course objectives (especially to direct their studying)
  • Reasons students lose or believe they lose points (whether they missed foundational knowledge, made “silly mistakes,” environmental factors and distraction, etc.)
  • Possible interventions or adjustments

How you implement an exam wrapper is up to you. Some possible strategies include:

  • An exam wrapper counting for an improvement of one half letter grade (from BC to B, for example) on the exam.
  • Requiring students complete a wrapper to turn in alongside corrections for full or partial credit on missed questions.
  • Pairing an exam wrapper with instructor- or TA-led review sessions for later exams. Note: If you go this route, it’s still a good idea to have students complete the wrapper activity shortly after receiving feedback on the exam they’re reviewing so it and their study habits are fresh in their minds.
  • Offering the exam wrapper as ‘makeup’ work for one or more formative activities which led up to the exam.
  • Offering course-level extra credit.
  • Some combination of any or all of these!

As students complete the survey/worksheet, encourage them to think about their answers as they go. A few examples:

  • The question about techniques lists good techniques for studying. Could you adopt one or more of these?
  • There is a question about how you use the learning objectives in the course. You might not yet, but doing so is a good way to get to know why we are doing what we are in this course—including why exam questions are what they are.
  • You’re also asked why you think you lost points on the exam. For the more frequent reasons, what adjustments might you make to avoid these in the future? Do you need to study differently or maybe just slow down when taking the exam?

The last few questions in the examples provides below ask students to articulate responses to these sorts of reflections.

If you are interested in trying out an exam wrapper, we might recommend beginning with a basic Canvas Survey. We have a file you can download and import into a Canvas course to get you started.

If you’re looking for something a little more robust or want to do more with the data, you can take a look at an Example Exam Wrapper Assignment using Qualtrics here. If you’d like a copy of the survey used in this example, you can download this Exam_Wrapper QSF File (Click to Download) and import it into your Qualtrics account (click for instructions). (Note: you do not want to re-use the link in the sample assignment since you will not be able to access the data/results.) The same assignment is available here in Word document format (Click to Download) if you prefer. The Canvas Survey version above is also very similar.

Additional examples of exam wrappers for various disciplines can be found on Carnegie Mellon University’s Eberly Center page on Exam Wrappers.

For further reading, see:

  • Badir, A. et al. 2018. “Exam Wrappers, Reflection, and Student Performance in Engineering Mechanics.” 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Salt Lake City, Utah. https://peer.asee.org/30462
  • Gizem Gezer-Templeton, et al. 2017. “Use of Exam Wrappers to Enhance Students’ Metacognitive Skills in a Large Introductory Food Science and Human Nutrition Course.” Research in Food Science Education 16(1): 28-36. https://doi.org/10.1111/1541-4329.12103
  • Pate, A. et al. 2019. “The use of exam wrappers to promote metacognition.” Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning 11(5): 492-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cptl.2019.02.008