Echo360 now has two additional media types to accompany the video, audio, and presentation types: Polls and Interactive Media.

A Poll is a reusable question or activity panel that can be added to media to request a response from the viewer. 

Interactive media is what results when you add a poll to a piece of video or audio media. The poll "gates" the playback so that the viewer (student) cannot continue viewing or listening until they respond to the poll.

Click on a video in your library to open the Media Details page, then select Add Poll as shown in the below figure.

After embedding one or more polls into the video, clicking Save creates a new piece of media that is now an Interactive Media type. The original video remains unchanged, as does the Poll you added to the video. This lets you edit the details of the embedded poll to be specific to this media, without the original Poll changing. 

Tips For Adding Polls to a Video

While CREATING a piece of interactive media is fairly straightforward, there are a few things you should know to avoid issues, and to be able to use your new media seamlessly.

Edit the video first

Creating and editing a piece of interactive media is a matter of bringing a video together with polling slides. The original video remains as it was, as do any polls you add. Meaning if you need the video to change, you have to edit the video first, before you add any polls. Once the new media is created it is now of a wholly different type of media. 

You may notice on your interactive media that the "edit media" option is grayed out. Editing interactive media means editing the polls embedded in the video. Add more, remove some, edit the polling activities themselves. So to edit the interactive media, you select Edit Polls. This is a little confusing the first few times you approach it. "Why is Edit Media not available! I want to edit my interactive media!"

Just understand that the interactive media is a new type of media, that is not video or poll but a combination of the two and as such has different rules about using it.

Place the video playhead before you add the poll

When adding a poll to a video, there are a few limitations:

• You cannot place the poll in the intro or outro section (if the video has either).
• You cannot place two polls in the same location of the video; they must have timestamps of at least one second difference

When you select to add a poll to a video (by creating one or adding one from your library) the default is to place that polling question at the current location of the video playhead. So the easiest way to add one in the location you want is to play or scrub the video to the location you want, then pause, then add the poll. The timestamp box for the poll allows you to tweak this location if you didn't pause at the exact place you wanted.

Once added, click play again, then pause, then embed your next poll.

A few more tips include:

• If the video has an intro clip but must START with a poll, play the video to the end of the intro, pause, then add the poll.
• If the video has an outro clip but must END with a poll, play the video to near the end but before the outro clip, pause, then add the poll.
• If you want two or more polls together, add the first one, click play to the next second, then pause and add the next one. Polls simply need to be offset by at least one second from each other. But you can have as many polls as you like strung together for several seconds if needed.

Rename the new piece of media

The new piece of interactive media will have the same name as the video/audio you selected to embed polls into. For this reason you may want to click the tile menu and select Edit Details to rename the media to indicate that this is the interactive media version of this item and as such contains embedded polls.

The interactive media you create has a different icon indicator to show that this is not just a video or audio file. But renaming also helps. The below figure shows an ad hoc capture turned into a piece of interactive media, with the new name as well as the interactive media icon visible on the media tile.

Limitations of Interactive Media

Only viewable through LMS/VLE Embedded media

For the first release of interactive media, the only place students will be able to view your interactive media is through embeds in your LMS/VLE. This means you will need to add the video to a content window using the Echo360 embed button configured for your LMS/VLE. Be advised however that your administrator will need to have UPDATED the plugin or building block for the Echo360 easy-embed button to provide "authenticated" views of embedded media.

The reason for this limitation is that we cannot allocate student responses to a poll unless we know who is responding. So the viewer of the media needs to be authenticated in Echo360 (which happens in the background when they click play) so we know who is providing the response(s).

If you are not sure if your Echo embed button has been updated, you can ask your administrator. OR...create a piece of interactive media, then attempt to embed the media into an LMS/VLE content window. If the Library media listing includes "interactive media", as shown in the below figure, then these are authenticated video embeds and you can embed interactive media.

If you do not have this option, ask your administrator to please upgrade the Echo360 embed tool for your LMS/VLE.

Students Can Submit Each Response One Time

Unlike the activity slides in presentation slide decks, students will NOT be given the opportunity to change their response once it has been submitted. This is because the video is gated on receiving a response, and once one is submitted, the video is open to all viewing. Allowing students to CHANGE their submission bypasses the purpose of the gating.

After a student responds, they are shown their answer along with the Correct answer if one is identified for this polling question. They also see a Continue button that allows them to continue playback of the media.

Viewing Student Responses to Embedded Polls

For all Interactive Media, there is now a Polling tab in the bottom section of the Media Details page. Click on the media from your library to open the media details page, then click the Polling tab, as shown in the figure below. From here, you can select the LMS/VLE course where the item is embedded, and then select which poll's responses you want to view.

See Viewing Responses to Embedded Polls for more information on what information appears for each polling question and student response.