Video is one of the most powerful, motivating, and visual ways to learn. You can use videos to promote critical thinking and active learning.
There's a big difference between watching a video and learning something from it.
Emily A. Moore, M.Ed., instructional designer in the online learning office at Texas State Technical College – Harlingen Campus, gives suggestions to help increase the educational effectiveness of an online course video. Read more in her article, "From Passive Viewing to Online Learning: Simple Techniques for Applying Active Learning Strategies to Online Course Videos."
Video can easily and effectively be incorporated inside your Blackboard courses to provide just-in-time feedback and/or to build in spontaneous interaction.
You can ask students to create videos to demonstrate learning. If you are interested how to use videos to demonstrate learning, read my “Video Assignments” blog post. This blog post also covers how students should go about linking to their videos in Blackboard.
There are several ways to add videos to your Blackboard courses. Blackboard supports embedding and/or linking to video from many other systems and solutions. Sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, or other video repositories can be embedded easily by switching to html mode in the Content Editor and then pasting in the embed code.
The benefit of embedding video into a course is that it enables the students to stay within the context of the course and within the sequence of instruction, rather than linking out away from course content.
Another way to add video to your course is to upload the video file (i.e., MPEG/AVI, QuickTime, Flash/Shockwave, Microsoft .asf and .wmv formats).
Video files are generally large files. Each Blackboard course has a 1.25 GB maximum course size limit. Your course size is total of your uploaded video files sizes along with the size of all other course content, including content uploaded into your course by your students.
It is a good idea to embed or link to videos rather than uploading video files to your course to help you to stay within the maximum course size limit. You can upload your videos to YouTube, Vimeo, or other media server and then embed or link to the video within the course as explained above. Detailed instructions on recording, uploading, and sharing videos on YouTube can be found in the "Want more information?" section below.
When adding video files, it is a good idea to include links to any browser plug-ins or media player files that users will need to view the videos.
Note: Video Everywhere, which previously allowed you to upload YouTube videos directly into the Content Editor, is temporarily unavailable due to a change in the Google authentication process. Blackboard is working on a fix for this. We don't have any word on when this feature will be available again.
Want more information?
Simple Techniques for Applying Active Learning Strategies to Videos
Best Practices for Posting Video Announcements
Embed Videos into Your Course
How to Create Audio, Image, and Video Links
Record, Upload, and Share Video on YouTube
Explore Blackboard’s On Demand Learning Center.
Try these Blackboard How-To documents.
Visit the Blackboard FAQs for additional blackboard information
or schedule a one-on-one session, email, or
call Janice Florent: (504) 520-7418.