EchoVideo supports two additional media types in addition to video, audio, and presentations: Polls and Interactive Media.
A Poll is a question or activity panel that prompts the viewer to respond.
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 EchoVideo user who has used activity slides in your presentation slide decks, you will be familiar with polling slides and likely have many polls in your Library.
If you are a new EchoVideo 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, think of them as reusable questions you can embed in your media as needed. 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 only that poll; these changes do not carry into any presentation or video the poll has been used in. You can edit the poll after it is embedded in the video or presentation, which changes only that instance; those changes do not affect the original poll in your library. Once added to media, the original poll selected and the poll in the media are two entirely separate entities and are managed separately.
Where Do Polls Come From?
New Polls are created every time you create a new poll to add to a piece of video/audio or presentation media. Both of these actions create a new, reusable poll in your library.
If you were an existing EchoVideo user when the interactive media feature was launched, every activity slide you had in any presentation was converted to a Poll with the release of this feature. These can now be selected for addition to any video, audio, or presentation 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 reusable objects that can be added to presentations or embedded into a video (or audio file). When a poll is added to a video, it creates a new piece of media called Interactive Media. This media is now wholly 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.
Embedding a poll into video or audio media provides a gate for viewers. It requires the viewer to respond to the polling question to continue. Polls can be placed throughout a video to ensure students are watching and cannot move forward until they submit 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.
Editing the poll after it is added to the media does not change the original poll. This means you can make your polls as generic or as specific as you want, depending on your preferred workflow.
Alternatively, you can create all your polls individually for each media where you need them. Once saved, they remain in your library for later use, or you can remove them if you no longer need them.
What Types of Polls Are Available?
If you are an existing user and have Polls automatically generated in your library from existing polling / activity slides, you can select all of those activities and types for use.
When you create a new poll, the question types available are the same as those for adding activity question slides to presentations. They include:
Each poll type has different response parameters, and all except Short Answer can identify a Correct response when appropriate. Refer to the linked articles above for detailed instructions on completing each form and how the completed polls appear to students.
What Happens if I Edit or Delete a Poll?
The short answer is that nothing happens outside of the poll you edited or deleted.
If you edit a poll from within the presentation editor or interactive media editor, the poll in your library does not change. The opposite is also true; editing the poll in your library does not affect the polls in any media that this poll was based on. The polls in your library are kind of like templates that way.
If you delete a poll, it is deleted. Any existing polling questions based on that poll remain in their media and can be used or edited (or removed) as needed.
What About Shared Media and Polls?
If your library contained a shared presentation with activity slides at the time this feature was released, you may notice that the owner of some 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 add it.
The owner of the media can see who has shared this presentation on their media details page. The same is true of the shared polls in their library that are also visible in yours. If they click the poll in their library, they can see your name among 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 the media based on the poll remain right where they are.
Poll sharing can be a very handy way for instructors of similar courses to share the questions they ask across classes in different sections. Sharing a poll means there is one template for adding 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 setup is the same.
Seeing Student Responses to Polling Questions
One common action is to go to the media details for a Poll and look for responses to it. This will not work. Remember, polls must be embedded into a video / interactive media to be viewable (and therefore answerable) by others. The same poll can be used in different places.
To view poll responses, go to the polling tab on the media details page for the interactive media where it is embedded, or to the polling tab for the EchoVideo course section where the media was published.
Currently, polls are only visible to others when embedded or created as Interactive Media. 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 figure below.
If multiple LMS / VLE courses are available, use the Course drop-down to select the course whose embed you want to view. Then, use the Poll drop-down to see each student's response to the selected question.