Adobe’s award winning Presenter Video Creator has been enhanced with new tools designed to put interaction right into educational videos. Trainers and Educators alike are rapidly adopting Adobe Presenter thanks to it’s amazingly simple, show-and-tell video tool. Innovations in the video tool have been delighting users for more than a year now. Given the immediate popularity of the new learner intervention, tracking and collaboration tools were added to interactive projects, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Adobe has released an update that now provides users a tool that will let them embed learner tracking and collaboration right inside the videos.

I think the simplest way to explain this new workflow is to do so in pictures.

I’ve explained extensively here how to use Adobe Presenter Video Creator. The short version is that it is unbelievably simple (just 4 buttons to worry about) and it’s designed to get you creating professional looking videos from the comfort of your desktop.

When you finish a video you can now publish it in several ways. You could think of them as two rows. The top row all publish to your local computer. The bottom row all publish online. The new option in the center of the top row is the ‘Enable Analytics and Publish to Computer.’ When you choose this option you’ll get a simple dialog that let’s you decide whether you’d like to report tracking data, and if you’d like to enable and track collaboration.
You can also publish to Adobe Connect and choose to enable analytics and collaboration, or you can publish to PowerPoint and could still add collaboration and tracking from Adobe Presenter (inside of Microsoft PowerPoint.)

Export to PowerPoint is a particularly interesting workflow for Flipped Classrooms because you can create a video and then easily add a quiz. Start by recording your video, then use the publish to PowerPoint output option. This will insert the recording in a slide and you can then simply click Manage Quiz to add one or more questions.

Think of this as a “video quiz module” (a module with one video and zero or more quiz questions.) For modules that contain a video with zero or more quiz questions, you will you get segment level tracking of the video.

A video module can have only one video (recorded or embedded) if you want to track the time segments. Each segment is 30 seconds long.

Just as the prompts imply, tick the boxes to Yes or No, depending on how you want to work with the interactive video. You then give the collaboration/tracking enabled video module a special name and click the Next box.

If you want, you can set a score for participation. The interactive video will monitor the conversations your learners have on the video, and assign them scores based on how much they discuss. One of the most amazing parts, is that Adobe will track all of it for you, so it doesn’t matter where you publish the video, as long as it’s on the Internet. The collaboration and interaction tracking will simply work.

The application will then prompt you to Sign In using your AdobeID. (This ensures that only you have access to the tracking information.)

Once the video finishes publishing, you will see a folder open – revealing the published files. Now normally when you publish a video – only the video and a thumbnail are published, so you would normally only see those two files. Because the interactive video requires the content to run as an HTML application, the contents of this folder include a bunch of files (don’t worry, you don’t need to know much about them.) To move the video to your website, Intranet, or LMS, just copy the contents of the folder, and place them on your Internet enabled site.

Now that you’ve finished publishing, you’ll want to check out the dashboard (where you’ll be able to see how much conversation is happening, who is done watching your videos. There is a little icon on the top right that looks like a pie chart. Just click the pie chart to go to the dashboard.

The dashboard is a website. When you click to go to the dashboard you’ll see this website. Click the button that says Get Started, to … get started.

Once you are on the website, you’ll see a sample course, and you’ll have the opportunity to explore – or to add your own course. A course could be just one video, or a series of videos, or it could even be a combination of videos and traditional interactive Adobe Presenter 9 projects with quizzes and drag and drop interactions.

To create a course, just click the big red + on the top left side. This adds a new course, and you’ll be shown the page that will allow you to name the course, add individual videos and quizzes etc.

In the above image you’ll note that I’ve named the course, set a start and end date, and identified a target date (intervention date) when I’d like the system to start monitoring student progress. I could have added as many videos and other elements to the course as I wanted. You’ll also notice that I’ve asked the system to monitor collaboration (participation) and to let me know if the students had completed viewing the video.

Once you’ve finished setting up your course, just click the done button at the bottom of this page. You are now ready to have a look at your course. Click the Overview button at the top to see the courses. Select your new course from the list of courses on the left.

In the above view I’ve selected the ‘Completed’ group in order to compare the progress of each of the students in this cluster. In this case all of the enrolled students have completed viewing the video. Note that I can do some pretty cool things here.

I can easily click any name to see how that student is doing. I can examine their participation. If I’ve included a quiz, I can see how each student performed and even compare their scores with other students. In fact, this simple tool gives me everything I need to easily communicate with my learners.

One of my favorite features is that with just one click you can email groups of learners, or individual learners. This gives you the power to reach students easily, and to intervene at the moment when learners are most at risk of falling behind.

In many ways, adding this collaboration and tracking to video is just a logical escalation, but it also signals a strong continuation of a trend that continues to enable learning providers (both trainers and educators) to easily follow the progress of their students, with really powerful ways to both understand that progress and to communicate with learners where and when that communication is most valuable.

As always, your comments and questions are appreciated. Please feel free to add them in the section below.