Tips & Tricks for Using PlayPosit

This page gathers some tried and true tips & tricks for success. We hope this info will help make the PlayPosit experience more enjoyable and engaging for you and your students!

Bulbs & Interactions

• Don't put an interaction right at the beginning or end of a Bulb. Always have at least three seconds from the end without any interactions to ensure your students will be able to start and complete the Bulbs without any technical errors.
• Before recording a lecture video, plan a few seconds of time where your interactions will be placed. This will make it easier to time interactions when you’re creating your Bulbs. PlayPosit Knowledge Base: Best practices for recording video (opens in a new tab)
• Acknowledge errors you made when recording or outdated info in your video with well-placed interactions. This will keep students on their toes while fostering authenticity and engagement.
• Get creative with the PlayPosit Rich Text Editor. PlayPosit Knowledge Base: Embed images, audio, attachments, equations, and tables (opens in a new tab).
• Make a template by copying a Bulb, deleting the old video, adding the new video, and adjusting the interactions’ timing. PlayPosit Knowledge Base: How to copy a bulb from My bulbs page (opens in a new tab)
• Check out PlayPosit's Templates and My Interactions (opens in a new tab) for quick and easy Bulb creation.
• Save some time by using Premade Bulbs (opens in a new tab) in your courses or get ideas from others’ by previewing Premade Bulbs. 
• Change the default point values using your profile to your most commonly used point values for each type of interaction. PlayPosit Knowledge Base: Bulb defaults (opens in a new tab) and Interaction defaults (opens in a new tab)
• Use Playlists to compile multiple Bulbs, documents, and other media types to create a comprehensive interactive experience. Explore PlayPosit Playlists

Grading & Student Experience

• Use Brightspace Gradebook Categories to change Bulb grade values in your courses’ Brightspace Gradebook.
• Use a naming convention for your Bulbs to make it easier to know where the Bulbs belong in the courses’ Content and the Grades. For example, the second Bulb in the first module of course JPN 245 might be named: JPN 245 Module 1 Bulb 2: Understanding the History of Anime.
• See exactly what your students see using the Learner Preview. PlayPosit Knowledge Base: Learner preview (opens in a new tab)
• When your Bulb has manually graded interactions students will receive a preliminary score for the auto-graded portion of the Bulb. This will likely be much lower than their actual final score for the bulb until you grade the manually graded interactions. Let your students know ahead of time a date on which their score in Brightspace will reflect their final score. PlayPosit Knowledge Base: Types of interactions (opens in a new tab)
• Make sure to remind students they must watch the Bulb all the way to the end until they see the Complete message to sync their grades. PlayPosit Knowledge Base: Complete a Bulb and syncing grades (opens in a new tab)
• Add some info about PlayPosit to your syllabus. Syllabus Introduction to PlayPosit
• Use interaction placement to call out or highlight certain areas of your video. PlayPosit Knowledge Base: Interaction Placement (opens in a new tab)
• Utilize the Partner Resources Page (opens in a new tab) to supplement your understanding of PlayPosit.
• Create an interactive syllabus or a course introduction for an engaging experience that also holds students accountable for syllabus and course content. Ideas and resources for creating an interactive syllabus:
  • Tired of Syllabi Questions? Get Interactive! (opens in a new tab)
  • Text-Based Bulb: Interactive syllabus (opens in a new tab)
  • Example: Interactive Syllabus Bulb (opens in a new tab)

Deep Dive: Best Practices for Creating Bulbs

Learn more at PlayPosit Knowledge Base: Building a Bulb in PlayPosit 3.0 (opens in a new tab)

• Keep it short. If possible, use video segments that are around six minutes or less.
• Be mindful of question placement. Try not to disrupt the cadence of the video; look for pauses/transitions where you can add interactions. The “preview” feature can greatly help with this as you are building a bulb. After previewing, you can manually adjust placement of questions back in edit mode. If recording your own video, consider adding pauses during recording where you would like to add interactions.
• Allow a few seconds at the beginning and end of a bulb before placing an interaction. Sometimes PlayPosit can glitch if there are interactions too close to the beginning or end of a bulb. We recommend leaving at least 3 seconds at the beginning and end of your bulbs that are free from interactions. Tip: search YouTube for a blank video, trim a few seconds of it, and bookend your bulb with the blank video to provide a buffer!
• Strike a happy medium with the number of interactions. Too many interactions can distract from the video content. Conversely, having one question in a five-minute video can be perplexing. You may find it useful to share a bulb with a colleague to get feedback on the experience before integrating into your course.
• As with all things in course design, think about your learning objective and build accordingly. Ask questions that get students thinking about what you want them to learn from the video. There’s no need to use all interaction types just because they are available. Choose interaction types carefully and in accordance with your goals.
• Provide feedback. Optimize auto-graded learning objects like PlayPosit bulbs by building in as much feedback for students as possible. In PlayPosit, you can add feedback based on answer choice. You can even add jumps to different parts of the video based on how a question is answered.
• Be cognizant of the bulb settings. Does it make sense for your students to be able to rewind, fast-forward, skip questions, or retake the bulb? Consider the experience you would like students to have and adjust these settings before sharing in your course.
• Give students credit. Even if it’s a small percentage of the grade, you can motivate students to take/retake a bulb by connecting it with the Brightspace gradebook. In doing so, you also get the added benefit of analytics to see how the learners are doing with the material. Learn more at PlayPosit Knowledge Base: Best practices when setting bulb completion scores (opens in a new tab)
• Save time – Use premade bulbs and templates! You can search bulbs made by other PlayPosit users on your My Bulbs page under Premade Bulbs. If you find one that works, you can copy and modify for your purposes! Use interaction templates from within the PlayPosit designer, or save your preferred interactions in My Interactions. Learn more: Webinar Recording: Time Saving Tips for Instructors (opens in a new tab)
• Save more time - adjust your bulb and interaction defaults at your account level! If you have preferred settings that you use for all your bulbs, you can set those preferences globally in your user account settings.

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