Media Cloud forecast: in-video quizzes and more

Recently the Bloomsbury Media Cloud User Group attended a presentation from MediaCore, the company who provide the platform and hosting that powers the service. There are some interesting developments in the pipeline.

In-video quiz prototype

• It is good to see research and thought has gone into this. The goal is that it should be designed and prototyped in accordance with educational theory and research and user community engagement. Reference to literature arguing that in an educational setting, videos shouldn’t just be passively consumed – you want the students actively engaging. 
• They have also surveyed academics and technical staff regarding what they would want to do if there was a quizzing functionality. An interesting result was ‘discuss the responses in class’. Also teachers felt they would change the way they create videos if they had the quizzing functionality, so seen as having a strong pedagogical affordance. 
• Also reviewed literature on quizzes/MCQs. Creating good ‘distractors’ (plausible wrong answers) and provision of response-contingent feedback (i.e. tells you why you are right or wrong) both seen as key. 
• Design is also based on Bloom’s taxonomy with a view to enabling and encouraging teachers to consciously apply Bloom’s taxonomy in design of questions and feedback. 
• Questions can be textual or image-based. 
• Getting it working smoothly and making it easy to use is the priority. Integration with Moodle gradebook and similar via SCORM or other methods is further down the track, but the group generally felt this functionality will be more valuable for formative/reflective purposes anyway. 

Now & next for the platform

• We are now using the new player. 
• You can now embed whole collections (not from the Chooser in Moodle though). 
• They now have epub support (i.e. you can upload an epub file as the main media item). 
• Capture app already existed for iOS devices, and now exists for Android and Windows 8 (PC & tablet). 
• Snagit integration allows upload of Snagit screencapture videos directly to MediaCore but there is a bug that is not displaying all the collections (this is currently with TechSmith to resolve). 
• Plan for everything to be more responsive to device/screen size so it works and looks better. 
• Planned new ‘super embed’ will allow a bunch of functionality from the site (e.g. collections, attached docs, download main media item) to be accessible from the embeds. 
• User group members Javiera Atenas, Elizabeth Charles and Leo Havemann supplied recommendations regarding inclusion of licensing options (including the range of Creative Commons licences) and these will be incorporated into the platform soon. 
• Sharing assets across more than one collection is known to be our current major issue.