When using video to teach, how do you know if your viewer actually learned what you wanted them to learn? I mean, how do you know if you're learning video was effective? Well, if you make your learning videos using Camtasia you can find out. Camtasia is a popular screen-capture and video-editing application. Along with capturing and editing video, Camtasia gives you the ability to test your viewer's knowledge of the material. And it does this by allowing you to embed quizzes into your video. But there's way more to Camtasia's quiz feature than just being able to ask your viewer a bunch of questions. With the right thinking and a few tweaks, you can turn a standard Camtasia quiz into an engaging, effective, and interactive learning experience. To show you what I mean we need to take a quick look at Camtasia's quiz feature. So, here we are in Camtasia's editing interface. This is Camtasia 9 for Windows, by the way. Let me just give you a brief lay of the land, here. This big window is the 'Canvas.' It shows a preview of what your finished video will look like to your viewer. Now, below the Canvas is the 'Timeline.' If you're familiar with other video-editing applications like iMovie or Adobe Premiere Pro this will look familiar. The timeline is where you build your final video, by arranging and connecting individual pieces of media. Above the timeline, and to the left of the canvas is the 'Media Bin' and 'Library' panels. This is where you store and access different media assets, like video clips, graphics or music tracks, to add to your project in the timeline. But what we're interested in is to the left of the media bin, here in this menu panel. And that is the 'Interactivity' menu item. Select 'Add Quiz to Timeline' and the interface changes a little bit. A quiz track appears above the timeline, and to the right of the canvas, the 'Properties Panel' opens up revealing two tabs. You also get this quiz placeholder graphic in the canvas window, which represents this little green label on the timeline, which is your quiz. You can click and drag this label along the timeline to wherever you want your quiz to appear in your video. You can have multiple quizzes in your video. If you just run your mouse along the quiz track you'll see this green 'plus' symbol. Click the symbol to add another quiz to your video at that particular spot. Now, to actually create our quiz questions and answers and all that stuff we need to go over, here, to these two tabs in the properties inspector. The first tab is the 'Quiz Options.' Here, you can set the name of the quiz, whether or not viewers can see their results, and whether or not the quiz will be scored. There's also a button where you can preview what your selected quiz is going to look like. That's kind of handy. The '?' tab is where you add the actual questions to your quiz.There are four question types to choose from.There's 'Multiple Choice,' 'Fill-in-the-Blank,' 'Short Answer,' and 'True/False.' This field is where you type in your quiz question and below that is where you input the answers and determine which one is correct. Pretty standard stuff, right? So, where is this amazing interactivity I was talking about at the beginning of this video? Well, the magic happens when you select this little 'Display Feedback' option. This opens up some additional fields where you can provide feedback depending on if your viewer got the question correct or incorrect. You can type a message in this field if the viewer answer correctly, and a separate message in this field if they answered incorrectly. But it's these two options labeled 'Action' that contain the real power. The 'Action' drop-down contains four options. The default option is 'Continue.' And this basically means the viewer can continue to the next section of video right after the quiz. If we hit the drop-down, we get some more options. We have 'Go To URL,' which takes the viewer to an external website address. You have 'Jumped To Time,' which takes the viewer to a different section of the video based on these timecode numbers, here, on the timeline. And 'Jump To Marker,' which takes the viewer to a section of the timeline that is labeled with a marker. You can also place markers on individual clips of media in your timeline. And you can select which action to take, separately, for both correct and incorrect answers, sending your viewer to a different scene, or section of video depending on their choice. Do you see the power of this? You can do way more than just tell the viewer whether or not they got the answer correct or incorrect. With this functionality you can actually create meaningful consequences for the choices that the viewer makes, by having your video branch off to other sections of video on the timeline, or other videos on other web pages. Now, before you get too excited there's something I should mention. In order to use Camtasia's interactive features, your video project needs to be hosted on a web server. Which means, you can't just export an mp4 video file and put it on YouTube or Vimeo and expect all of that interactivity to work. Because it won't. There are a bunch of additional files required to make the interactivity work, and those files need to be hosted on a web server. Either your server, Amazon s3, or Screencast.com, which is operated by Techsmith, the makers of Camtasia. Exporting an interactive video out of Camtasia and uploading it to a web server is a fairly straightforward process, and a small price to pay for not having to code all of that interactivity, yourself. Camtasia has it built in, which is why Camtasia is one of my favorite tools for creating outstanding video learning. If you want to know the other tools that I suggest for creating low-cost, high-quality learning videos, download my Video Learning Toolkit Resource List. you can grab that right now by hitting the link on the screen, or in the description, below. You'll find some great tools on that list. Thanks for watching. And I'll see you next time.
