Echo360 now has two additional media types to accompany the video, audio, and presentation types. Polls and Interactive Media.
A Poll is a question or activity panel that requests 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.
If you are an existing Echo360 user who has used activity slides in your presentation slide decks, you will be familiar with polling slides. You will also notice that your library is suddenly FULL of Polls! This is because when the embedded polling feature was released, all your existing activity slides were automatically turned into polls. This is so that you can find and re-use those polling questions you've used before and which used to live only in slide decks.
A future release of Echo360 will also make Polls available for use in presentation slide decks.
If you are a new Echo360 user or you have not previously used activity slides in your presentation decks, you will have to create polls to add to your video/audio media to create interactive media.
Once you have polls in your library, however, think of it as a repository for reusable activities that you can embed into your media as needed. This allows you to customize your polls to meet your personal workflow and needs. You can have a library of very specific polls that can be added to media without changing them. OR you can have a library of fairly generic polls, that you can edit the specifics of after they have been embedded. Use whichever approach works best for you.
What this means is that you can edit the Polls in your library, which changes the re-usable object available to select. You can edit the polling question after it is embedded, which does NOT change the original poll that generated it. Once added to media, the Poll selected to embed and the actual embedded polling question are two entirely separate entities and can be managed separately.
Where do Polls come from
New Polls are created every time you create a new poll to add to a piece of media, or when you add an activity/polling slide to a presentation. Both of these actions create a new, reusable poll in your library.
If you are an existing Echo360 user and you have ever added "activity slides" or "polling slides" to a presentation, you now have Polls in your library. Every activity slide you have in any presentation was converted to a Poll with the release of this feature and can be selected for addition to a video or audio file.
If you have polls from converted activity slides, you may want to go clean up your library by removing duplicate polls.
How do I use Polls
Polls are re-usable objects that can be embedded into a video or audio file. When a poll is added to either of these, a new piece of media is created called "Interactive Media" that is separate from the video. More polls can then be added to the new piece of interactive media. Or you can add different polls to the same video, creating a different piece of interactive media. A future release of Echo360 will allow for Polls to also be added to presentations.
Embedding a poll into video or audio media provides a "gate" for viewers. It requires the viewer to respond to the polling question in order to continue to view the media. Polls can be placed throughout a video, to ensure students are actually watching, and to ensure that they cannot move forward until they have submitted a response.
Like any type of polling activity, once you add a poll, you can edit it as needed to be specific to this media or class. You can change the question text, add, edit, or remove response options, change the image used, and request justifications.
Changing the polling question after it is added to the media does not change the poll used to add it. Meaning you can make your polls as generic or as specific as you want, depending on your preferred workflow.
What Types of Polls are Available
If you are an existing user and you have Polls automatically generated in your library from existing polling/activity slides, all of those activities and types can be selected for use.
When you create a new poll, the types of questions available are the same as those available for adding activity question slides to presentations. They include:
Each type of poll has different parameters for responses, and all of them except Short Answer have the ability to identify a "Correct" response if appropriate. Refer to the above linked articles for details on creating each type of Poll.
What Happens if I Edit or Delete a Poll
The short answer is "The poll is edited or deleted from your library; no other changes are made."
If you have already embedded a poll into one or more pieces of media, that embed remains the same. Any FUTURE questions based on this poll will have the poll's changes reflected. And those can be edited once added to the media.
If you delete a poll, it simply deletes the poll. Any existing polling questions based on that poll remain in their media and can be used or edited (or removed) as needed.
Remember that editing a poll in your library is different than editing an embedded poll in interactive media.
What about Shared Media and Polls
If your library contained a shared presentation with activity slides in it at the time this feature was released, you may notice that the owner of some of the polls in your library is NOT you! These came from the shared presentation(s). And like ANY shared media, what YOU have is effectively a link to something owned by someone else, but accessible by you.
Because Polls are NOT changed by adding them to videos, you can use these shared polls to add polling questions to your media. Once added, the polling question in your media is entirely independent of the poll used to put it there.
The owner of the media can see to whom this presentation is shared in their media details page. The same is true of the shared polls in their library that are also visible in yours. If they click on the poll from their library, they can see your name as one of the people to whom this item is shared. Other users can also share polls with you separately from sharing a full presentation.
If the owner of the shared presentation "unshares" the presentation or "unshares" the poll, OR if YOU select to remove the shared presentation from your library, those polls go away too. However any polling questions you added to media based on the poll remain right where they are.
Sharing of polls can be a very handy way for different instructors of similar courses to share the questions they ask across classes in different sections. Sharing a poll means that there is ONE template used for adding the polling questions to the media, ensuring at least some degree of uniformity. Yes the questions can be edited after they are added, but it still ensures the base set up is the same.
Seeing Student Responses to Polling Questions
One common action is to go to the media details for a Poll and try to find responses to it. This won't work. Remember that Polls are the reusable items being placed into the viewable media. They must be embedded into a video/interactive media in order to be viewable (and therefor answerable) by others.
So, to view the responses to a polling question, you must go to the media details page for the interactive media where it is embedded.
Currently, polls are only visible to others by embedding them and creating Interactive Media. Interactive media is only publishable as an embedded video in an LMS/VLE content window. Once it has been embedded and students have viewed and responded to the polls, those responses are visible in the Polling tab of the media details page of your interactive media. This is shown in the below figure.
Use the Course drop-down list to select which LMS/VLE course's embed to see the responses for (if there is more than one), and then the Poll drop-down, to see each student's response to the selected question.
