Interactive Video - Note

About Avanti Fellows

The mission for Avanti Fellows is to provide children from low income backgrounds access to quality higher education enabled by effective supplementary learning programs with significant additional teaching at a student level.

Problem

In 2020, millions of students were forced to study online during the COVID-19 lockdown. Avanti Fellows was running an at-home learning program for the students of public schools in Haryana. They were teaching Math and Science using a combination of simple tools. Content was being served through YouTube Videos while Google Forms were being used for assessments and quizzes.

But student engagement was a big problem with even the best videos seeing a sharp drop off after 1 minute. Additionally, YouTube only provides aggregate statistics with no way to gather data at an individual viewer level.

Solution

To tackle this, the team developed Plio - an open source tool that allows any educator to convert any YouTube video into interactive lessons and gather rich data on user engagement. Soon, the YouTube & Google Form links being sent to students on Whatsapp were switched with Plio links. Students started watching these interactive videos and learning in an interactive manner. More than 40,000 students interacted with Plio with a 5x higher retention rate compared to passive videos.

Currently, Plio has more than 9000+ registered users with 2 other NGOs outside of Avanti Fellows actively using it.

Contribution to Sunbird

Interactive Video V1

Sunbird currently supports Question Sets and Videos separately. However, we have learned that engagement with videos is much higher if questions can be placed inside videos. Once the videos are made interactive, the learning experience is much more enjoyable for the end user.

With support for Interactive Videos in Sunbird, we will have the capability to:

1. Make any video interactive: The goal is to design this in such a way what any available video can be made interactive by adding any question set at any timestamp in the video.

2. Publish interactive videos as a new form of content: This will enable teachers to leverage interactive videos to improve the experience for learners

3. Analyse interactions at a deeper level: The interactive video platform will provide an exhaust for telemetry and analysis which will allow data about engagement at a very detailed level

Current Status

Capabilities released until now:

• Ability for a creator to add questions to any new video being uploaded

• Enabling Interactive Video Consumption experience

Please note, these capabilities are right now released under staging.

Below is our roadmap:

Possible use-cases

Based on Avanti Fellows' experience with Plio, following are the use-cases where Interactive Video could be a powerful tool:

• Digital Homework/Revision: Interactive videos can serve as a homework tool, where teachers can send or assign interactive videos as homework to students, which they can engage with in a fun manner. It can also serve as a revision tool for students before exams.
  Currently, in Avanti Fellows' Sankalp program, teachers across Haryana are using interactive videos as digital homework. You can access the Avanti interactive video library here. On an average, 500-1000 students engage with the content on a weekly basis.

• Teacher Training: Interactive videos can also be used to interact with teachers in their training programs. Currently Peepul, is using Plio to send interactive videos as pre-course material in their teacher training program in Delhi. They have already used it to train 4k+ users.

Experiment Design

Objective

With capabilities released to enable online consumption of interactive videos, we want to run a small experiment/s in order to:

• Get feedback on user experience of the interactive video capabilities released

• Compare engagement levels of interactive video with that of passive videos

Experiment Design

Experiment Period

Experiment Audience