You are perfectly familiar with the use of the Dynamic Rich Media player and its annotation system, and you would now like to enrich your media with activities indexed to your video. In this section, we will explore the details of creating and managing the two types of activity offered by Nudgis: polls and questionnaires.

 

TABLE OF CONTENT

1/ GENERAL INFORMATION

2/ POLLS AND QUESTIONNAIRES

3/ INTEGRATING AN ACTIVITY INTO A MEDIA

 

GENERAL INFORMATION

Activities are forms asking users to answer questions about the media. This makes it possible to check your audience's understanding, to allow them to express their views on a specific point in the media, and to make the results visible to the Speakers in the form of overall statistics. Like other annotations, activities can be overlaid on the video at a specific point during playback to ensure they won't be overlooked by viewers.

To create an activity, go to the "Administration" panel, "Social interactions" section, "Manage activities" tab :

You will only be able to add an activity to a media if your account has been authorized to do so by a site Administrator. If this is not the case, "Manage activities" will not appear in the list of choices.

This is the list of the polls and questionnaires you can access. You can manage these existing activities by:

• Editing, i.e. modifying all or part of the activity (title, questions, type, options attached)
• Copying, which allows you to take an activity and modify it slightly without altering the original (this means that you can quickly have two relatively similar activities)
• Viewing the results of the activity
• Deleting

You can also set an activity time for your poll or questionnaire, called a session. Simply set the start date and time of an activity session by clicking on the corresponding blue edit button in the "Status" section. This will open a window in which you can apply your choices, either manually or using a calendar:

To leave a poll or questionnaire active indefinitely, simply leave the "End date" field blank.

A session can have four statuses - deactivated, closed, ongoing or upcoming:

The icons accompanying the status will change, depending on the state of the session. A closed session can be reopened by applying start and end dates to it using the adjacent calendar icon. If it is upcoming or in progress, you can edit the start and end dates, and delete the session, i.e. close it. Finally, an open session can have an end date only.

The other information available on this screen is the title and type of the activity, its category (if these have been made available by the site administration team), and the date and time of its last modification:

If you are an Administrator, a "Manage" categories button will be available in this page. From this menu, you can create and delete activity categories of your choice.

Finally, you can filter the results to display only the activities you want, or use the search bar to filter by keywords :

You can filter by type of activity, category or status, selecting only the options you are interested in.

Now that these concepts have been defined, it is time to create our first activity. Simply click on the button corresponding to the type of activity you want (poll or questionnaire):

A new page will open, offering different options depending on the type chosen. In this first case, we will look at the poll.

 

POLLS AND QUESTIONNAIRES

On this page, you can give your poll a title, assign it a category if any are activated, and define its behaviour:

You can :

• Open it to unauthenticated users
• Share it, i.e. give editing rights to other administrators
• Display the title of the poll
• Choose to display the results at the end for participants
• Choose to define if the session is opened or closed when the poll is created
• Shuffle the questions
• Shuffle the choices
• Allow rectifications to be made to responses that have already been validated
• Allow multiple responses to the same poll/questionnaire. Enter 0 to disable this limit

If you authorize rectifications and simultaneously give users the option of completing the survey/questionnaire several times, rectifications can only be applied to the last participation in the activity.

You will have noticed that one box is not included in this list: "Poll". Unchecking it automatically transforms the type of activity into a questionnaire, which we will look at in the last part of this chapter.

Once you have defined these options, simply click on "Add a question":

The new question will be created and will be available for editing. You can also delete it at any time:

To edit it, click on the box (here under the text "New question"). This will open a section in which you can type the text of your question, make it mandatory to continue the poll, and apply a type of answer behaviour to it:

All the text fields allow you to work on the formatting, add links, copy and paste images, or even modify the source code.

You can choose to allow users to give just one answer, several answers, express their choice on a scale that you determine, or allow them to give their opinion in text form. Finally, it is possible to give the user general feedback on the question. You can write a text in the "Feedback about answer" field, and this note will be displayed for the user once they have chosen a proposal: 

The "Feedback about answer" can be given to any type of question.

Now, let's look at the different options available depending on the type of question selected.

In the case of the scale, you can choose a value between zero and one for the lowest score, and between one and ten for the highest. You can also create a name for them:

Then click on "Add a question" if you wish to continue with the poll. Once a question has been added, it can be modified at any time during the creation of the poll (or afterwards) by clicking on it:

You can also add questions to the activity whenever you want once you have saved the changes.

In the other question types, the "Users can select only a single answer" and "Users can select multiple answers at the same time" selections allow you to offer as many choices as you wish:

Finally, the last type of question, "Text response", allows users to write their own answer to the question asked:

Once you have completed your poll, simply click on "Save changes" to create it and make it available on the activity management homepage.

Your first poll is now ready to be incorporated into the media and put to the test of public opinion! Now let's have a look at how the questionnaire works.

Very similar to a poll in its creation, the questionnaire introduces the notion of correct answers to the questions proposed. Here too, you need to choose a title, a category if necessary, and set the options dictating the behaviour of the questionnaire. You will notice that the "Poll" box is unchecked:

Here too, the text field lets you add images and links, and customise the layout:

You can include as many questions and answers as you like. To make one or more answers right, tick the "Correct" box corresponding to the good choice(s).

The "Scale" answer type is not available for questionnaires.

Once you have created your activities, you can test them (i.e. a visual representation of what the viewer will see) by clicking on their title in the management page. Note that you can make changes during the preview: 

You have now created activities that can be selected and integrated into your media. Now let's see how it works.

 

INTEGRATING AN ACTIVITY INTO A MEDIA

Go to the video you want to add an activity to, and from the sidebar, in the Timeline tab, click on the "Plus" icon and select "Activity". A page will open offering you several choices:

Here you can select a poll/questionnaire, a Wikipedia URL or custom HTML code, and give your activity a title. You can also enter the time code at which you want your activity to open, and manage its position on the reading window maximized, over the player, over the sidebar, or over the player and sidebar simultaneously). This menu also allows you to define behaviour by enabling/disabling the following three options:

• Bypassable activity: if this parameter is unchecked, the activity becomes mandatory in order to continue playing the media
• Auto display of the activity: the activity is superimposed on the media when it is opened
• Pauses playback: media playback stops when the activity is opened

In the case of a Wikipedia URL, you can order the activity to be opened in another browser tab. Note that it is possible to put a link to a site other than Wikipedia, but this site must authorize opening in iframe:

The custom HTML code allows you to write your own activity code in the editable field provided:

However, if you select "Polls/Questionnaires", you will find the activities you have created in the Administration menu, with the option of searching/filtering them in the same way as in "Manage activities":

If the activity you want does not yet exist, or is not in the list, click on "Manage" to enter the administration menu.

Otherwise, select the activity you want and click "Submit". The activity will then appear in the annotations, and will be triggered at the chosen moment of media playback:

Once the activity has been completed by your viewers, you will be able to view the results, presented in the form of statistics. To do this, go to the Edit mode of your media, and click on the "Activities" tab:

You will be able to act on the activities linked to the media, edit them, put them in session or delete them, and consult the statistics. The same functionality is available if you return to the "Manage activities" page in the administration panel, and click on the corresponding results icon:

A window will appear, giving you all the results:

To find your way around more easily, you can filter the results in different ways:

By period:

• Over the entire period of the activity's existence
• Over a specific session (if there have been several)
• Over a specific period, to be chosen from a dedicated calendar

By media:

• All media
• On the media linked to the responses, i.e. the videos on which the linked activity was carried out
• On a specific media, by pasting the OID of the video searched in the "Object identifier" field

Finally, you can extract your results in the form of a CSV export, the limits of which you can set:

The given period will be the one defined by the filters, which will therefore be applied in full to the exported data. You can also choose the format based on your type of operating system. This will allow you to retrieve the data in a file that you can edit as you wish.

 

Now you know all about the activities offered by Nudgis and how to integrate them into your media ! All that is left is for you to create your own questionnaires and polls, and see for yourself how agile and effective this system can be with your viewers. We hope you enjoy using our solutions !

 

To continue : "Trimming your Nudgis videos"