Spotlight: Faculty Supporting Student Engagement with Interactive Videos

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Are you curious about how to elevate student engagement in your courses? Faculty at CSUCI are doing just that by transforming their teaching with PlayPosit, a digital learning tool that allows instructors to create interactive video experiences through embedded questions, comprehension checks, and reflection prompts (if this sounds familiar to you, you may recall our Engaging Students in STEM with PlayPosit series from the 22/23 academic year).

Across disciplines, faculty at CI are harnessing PlayPosit’s unique features to enhance flipped classrooms, bring in diverse voices, and foster deeper connections in online learning spaces. In this post, you’ll hear directly from faculty who’ve incorporated PlayPosit into their courses, sharing their successes, insights, and advice for those looking to explore this powerful tool. Read on to discover how CSUCI faculty are using PlayPosit to engage students in fresh, innovative ways.

Stories from faculty creating interactive videos

Michelle Kobrin, Chemistry: Enhancing Flipped Classroom Delivery

In Fall 2024, I transitioned my advanced, flipped chemistry class to PlayPosit with the goal of enhancing student engagement and tracking their active participation. Their weekly assignments now include a series of short PlayPosit videos with built-in pauses for comprehension checks.

The transition to PlayPosit was seamless, with a minimal learning curve and just a few minor bugs that were easy to fix. TLi was fantastic, providing excellent support and helping me create an engaging and interactive learning environment for my students.

Since implementing PlayPosit, I’ve noticed a significant increase in student engagement during high-level reviews of the material, and students are taking more detailed lecture notes. Their feedback has been positive. They appreciate the real-time feedback during the video interactions, which helps them assess their understanding, and they also enjoy the flexibility to pause and return to the videos whenever they need to.  

I highly recommend Playposit to anyone with a flipped classroom looking to enhance the student experience.

Kat Cosby, Black Studies: Incorporating More Voices in the Classroom

I have been using PlayPosit to deliver lectures online for a few years in my Introduction to Africana Studies course. Though there was a learning curve with the technology and getting the most out of student engagement, it has been a powerful tool in the classroom. Given the amount of video content produced by scholars and academic institutions, it provides a seamless way to incorporate more voices in my lectures. When appropriate, I have been able to create short videos that center the scholar in the assigned reading for the week. PlayPosit enables an easy integration of videos on YouTube, Vimeo, and my recorded lectures. For major assignments, I have learned through my students that they revisit the lectures and the clips of authors from assigned readings to make better arguments in their work.

I embed questions and polls in videos through PlayPosit for in-person classes to check for basic comprehension. It is also great for providing instant feedback and guiding a class conversation. 

Andrea Bingham, Educational Leadership: Engaging Online Doctoral Students

I’ve been using PlayPosit in my doctoral-level course and it’s made a huge difference in student engagement. I decided to try PlayPosit because I wanted to keep as many of the discussion and engagement activities from my in-person course as I could, and PlayPosit did help me do that. I use it to record my lectures, and then I embed interactions that allow me to check for understanding, guide student reflections, and provide students with the opportunity to engage in discussion with each other and see how their classmates are making sense of the material. It has definitely allowed me to translate many of the activities I might typically do in person to the asynchronous online context. Many students have reached out to say they enjoy the PlayPosit lectures and the opportunities to engage with their peers, and see what questions other students have. This also provides a place for them to answer each others’ questions where appropriate. This week, one student reached out to say ,“I really enjoy the lectures (you are doing an excellent job with those by the way), because I feel like I am in a class with others at those moments.” It was very easy to learn how to use PlayPosit, and I’ll definitely use it moving forward, and keep digging into ways to use PlayPosit in even more innovative ways.

Elizabeth Sowers, Sociology: Solidifying Core Concepts

I decided to use PlayPosit for some essential course videos in SOC 100 (Introduction to Sociology), one of which deals with the key framework used in SOC 100 — the Sociological Imagination.  Because this is the core concept of the class, it’s one students work on all semester to develop and refine their understanding and application of it.  As such, I typically get a lot of questions about it over the course of the semester! I thought it would be a great idea to record a mini-lecture for students to watch anytime (even outside of our in-person class) and to embed practice test questions within it via PlayPosit so that students could have practice with assessing their own knowledge at home. I was a little scared of PlayPosit as a tool, but TLi offered great support and it’s not hard at all once you get the hang of it. I am pleased to report that most students in my class have watched the video multiple times (how cool is that!) and they have shared with me that they appreciate the opportunity to review this ahead of our course exams. And speaking of the course exams — I can report that student scores on the short answer question related to this video were a full 20% higher than previous times I’ve taught that class! 

Feeling inspired? Learn more about how you can create interactive videos

  • Attend a PlayPosit webinar featuring CI faculty on Nov 14th at noon. Jessica Muth, from MVS School of Business & Economics, will share her work in a PlayPosit-hosted webinar: “Build a Strong Course Foundation: PlayPosit for Comprehensive Course Overviews and Tours.” To attend virtually on Nov 14th at 12:00, register now!
  • Join the self-paced PlayPosit Creator Challenge. This is a fun, fast, interactive way to learn about PlayPosit. It consists of three short, self-paced modules with examples, expert-led tutorials, and practice opportunities. Signing up is easy—just click the PlayPosit Creator Challenge link and log in with your Google account (if you have trouble accessing it, email georgia.vantyne@csuci.edu).
  • Set up PlayPosit with existing support.

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