A Case Study on Interactive Video and Distance Learning

The Challenge

North Carolina State University offers a variety of undergraduate and graduate online and distance courses in a range of subjects, from Accounting and Animal Science to Social Work and Sociology. John, a teaching assistant professor in the Poole College of Management at NCSU, was having trouble keeping his distance education students engaged -- he found that a lack of interactivity within his lectures prevented his courses from being as effective as they could be.

The Solution

John decided to use PlayPosit to increase his students’ engagement with his online classes. While he initially chose PlayPosit because he thought the interactions would help students engage more with his lessons, he was pleasantly surprised by PlayPosit’s game-changing analytics.

PlayPosit lets John “see and confirm that students have completed the lessons. It then gives [him] great metrics regarding ‘got it’ topics and ‘trouble’ topics, allowing [him] to spend extra time on the latter with [his] students prior to major examinations.”

PlayPosit’s comprehensive analytics provide valuable user-level data to teachers. After students have completed a lesson, instructors immediately know which areas of a lesson are hard to understand, which concepts the students are breezing through, and whether or not their students have completed assigned lessons. These metrics help instructors like John tailor their lessons to the specific needs of their students, making the class more impactful and relevant as time goes on even if the course is taken remotely.

The Result

After implementing PlayPosit into his distance learning curriculum, John and his students were satisfied with their experiences with our platform: “The feedback from students has been great -- they love the more interactive and engaged feeling that [John’s] PlayPosit-enabled class provides them.”

Enhancing distance learning programs with interactive video helps learners engage more with the material and lets instructors tailor their lessons to the needs of the students with ease. By providing real-time analytics to instructors of online courses, PlayPosit combines the benefits of interactive video with the transparency of a traditional classroom setting. At PlayPosit, we’re continuously striving to engage learners in new ways. No two learners understand the same material identically, especially in online higher education programs. With more students taking online college courses than ever before, we want to ensure that students are effectively engaging with every class’s concepts on their own -- and when the inevitable tough lesson surfaces, we want to give teachers the tools and information to engage students in any setting.