A Poll is a reusable question that can be added to media to request a response from the viewer.

When you add a poll to media, interactive media results. The poll gates the playback of the media, so the students cannot continue viewing until they respond to it.

Click on a media tile in your library to open the Media Details page, then select Polls, as shown in the figure below.

After embedding one or more polls into the media, clicking Save creates a new media piece, now an Interactive Media type. The original media remains unchanged. This lets you continue to use the media in other applications or replace it with the new interactive media if appropriate.

Tips For Adding Polls to Media

While creating interactive media is relatively straightforward, you should know a few things to avoid issues and use your new media seamlessly.

Edit the Media First

You cannot use the EchoVideo media editor to edit interactive media. If the media needs to be edited for use as interactive media, you must edit it before you add polls to it. This is due to various limitations but is primarily because each poll in the interactive media has a timestamp, indicating its location in playback. If you edit the media portion, those timestamps are no longer accurate. Furthermore, editing media sends it back through the media processor in EchoVideo; the media processor has no knowledge of polls.

You may notice that the edit media option is grayed out on your interactive media. Editing interactive media means editing the polls embedded in the media. Add more, remove some, and edit the polling questions themselves. So, to edit the interactive media, you select Edit Polls. This is a little confusing the first few times you approach it. "Why is Edit Media not available? I want to edit my interactive media!"

Just understand that interactive media is a new type of media—not media or poll but a combination of the two—and it has different rules about using it.

Place the Media Playhead Before You Add the Poll

When adding a poll to media, there are a few limitations:

• You cannot place the poll in the intro or outro section (if the media has either).
• You cannot place two polls in the same location of the media; they must have timestamps that differ by at least one second.

When you select to add a poll to media (by creating one or adding one from your library), the default is to place that polling question at the current location of the media playhead. So, the easiest way to add one in your desired location is to play or scrub the media to the location you want, pause, and then add the poll. The timestamp box for the poll allows you to modify this location if you did not pause at the exact place you wanted.

Once added, click play again, pause, and embed your next poll.

A few more tips include:

• If the media has an intro clip but must start with a poll, play it to the end of the intro, pause, and then add the poll.
• If the media has an outro clip but must end with a poll, play it near the end, but before the outro clip, pause it, then add the poll.
• If you want two or more polls together, add the first one, click play to the next second, then pause and add the next one. Polls need to be offset by at least one second from each other. But you can have as many polls as you like strung together for several seconds if needed.

Rename the New Piece of Media

The new interactive media will have the same name as the media you selected to embed polls into. For this reason, you may want to click the tile menu and choose Edit Details to rename the media to indicate that this is the interactive media version of this item and, as such, contains embedded polls.

The interactive media you create has a different icon indicator to show that this is not just a video or audio file. But renaming also helps. The figure below shows an ad hoc capture turned into a piece of interactive media, with the new name and the interactive media icon visible on the media tile.

Limitations of Interactive Media

Only for Authenticated Users

BUILDING BLOCK END-OF-LIFE ANNOUNCEMENT

As of 30 Dec 2024, the Anthology (Blackboard) Building Block has officially reached its end of life for use with EchoVideo.

Prior to the end-of-life date of December 30th, 2024, all Building Block content must have been converted to LTI 1.1 Deep Links. For more information from Anthology, please see Convert Building Block Content to LTI.
For more information from us, please see Building Block to LTI Migration Overview and Converting Blackboard Building Block Content to LTI 1.1 Deep Links.
NOTE that while migrating to LTI 1.3 may appear to be an option within Blackboard, it has not been fully tested by us. We are only supporting migrating to LTI 1.1.

Students can view your interactive media from the Class list, through authenticated share links, or embeds in your LMS / VLE. 

This limitation is because we cannot allocate student responses to a poll unless we know who is responding. So, the media viewer needs to be authenticated in EchoVideo (which happens in the background when they click play).

Students Can Submit Each Response One Time

Unlike the activity slides in presentation slide decks, students cannot change their responses once they have been submitted. This is because the media is gated upon receiving a response, and once one is submitted, it is open to viewing. Allowing students to change their submissions bypasses the purpose of the gating.

After a student responds, they are shown their answer along with the Correct answer if one is identified for the polling question. If Feedback has been provided for the poll, they will see that below their response. Students also see a Continue button that allows them to continue the playback of the media.

Viewing Student Responses to Embedded Polls

For all Interactive Media, you can view the responses from the course Polling tab or the Media Details Page Polling tab. From either place, you can select the LMS / VLE or EchoVideo course where the item is published and select which poll's responses you want to view. In addition, both polling response locations allow the downloading of student responses to a CSV file.

The figure below shows the Polling tab on the Media Details page.

Folders

Folder Analytics displays Polls data for all content published in your folder, irrespective of the route to the folder. This means that analytics for content linked from the LMS / VLE and the analytics for anyone who may access the folder directly are consolidated into one view. This also allows those who do not utilize an LMS / VLE to access this data.