Christy Spivey

Interactive Office Mix Videos to Increase Student Engagement

Purpose
Hi Everyone!
The purpose of my project is to help students gain a better mastery of the problem-solving portions of my course by making available to them interactive videos that demonstrate example problems.

I used this project as an opportunity to learn a new technology tool, Office Mix. It is a free plug-in to PowerPoint that allows for relatively easy creation of interactive videos and screencasts.

Most students find the quantitative, problem-solving content in my course the most difficult. I hope that providing the videos will:

Free up some class time, for face-to-face classes, to devote to more complex problems and active group learning
Allow students to watch how to solve a problem step-by-step as many times as they need to understand it
Increase student engagement
Enhance critical thinking and deeper understanding of the concepts and decrease the tendency that students have to memorize steps

For this project, I am making videos for a Health Economics class. I teach this course both in an online format and in a traditional face-to-face format. The videos have been utilized in my face-to-face course and will be utilized in both courses in the future. The videos include voice, annotation, and interactive elements like quizzes and polls.

Here is a short sample video:

When creating an mp4 from an Office Mix, interactive elements like quizzes and polls can’t be converted. So, here is a link to the same Mix with the quiz/review question at the end:
https://mix.office.com/watch/owx17w4qjmkv

Methodology
To create the videos, I utilized Office, along with my Surface Pro and a headset to enhance sound quality. The Surface Pro is essential if you want to record annotation with the stylus in real time.

Office Mix has the following benefits:

It’s free
You can start with PowerPoint slides that you’ve already created
It has cloud-based storage of your recordings, but videos can be downloaded to your hard drive
It can be integrated with Blackboard
It has analytic tools allow you can track who watches each video and for how long
Quizzes embedded in videos can be graded
You can include a video of yourself, if desired
It allows for basic editing of your recordings

Watching these videos is a great place to start learning about Office Mix:
https://mix.office.com/en-us/tutorials

After that, I recommend checking out the website “Office Mix for Teachers”:
www.mixforteachers.com

This document is very helpful:
http://www.mixforteachers.com/uploads/5/0/2/4/50241791/office_mix_help_guide_final.pdf

For me, making these videos is part of a larger effort to create a partially-flipped, blended learning experience for my students. To learn more about how to do this, I have taken several week-long workshops at the Online Learning Consortium, including “Introduction to Online Presentation Tools,” “Creating Multimedia Introductions,” and “Designing a Flipped Classroom.”

The Online Learning Consortium has many great workshops if you would like to further explore the world of online and blended learning:
http://onlinelearningconsortium.org/learn/workshops/

Assessment
Thus far I have made available a number of videos for student viewing. Approximately 2/3 of the students have accessed the videos.

Since I am not yet implementing a true flipped course format and am not assessing students based on their answers to questions embedded in the videos, watching the videos is not yet mandatory. In the future, it will be necessary to watch the videos to be prepared for activities in the classroom and in order to complete the embedded assessments.

One concern was that availability of videos in a course might decrease attendance. Thus far, this has not seemed to be a problem. While my attendance has declined over the semester in the Health Economics course, it has not declined more than in other courses in which I am not using videos.

Informal feedback from students regarding the videos has been positive so far. From their perspective, the obvious benefit is being able to watch me work problems as many times as they wish. I plan to utilize an anonymous Blackboard survey to get feedback from students about the Office Mix videos.

Christy Spivey, PhD

Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Economics, UT Arlington

[email protected]

Dr. Spivey is a Labor and Health Economist. In addition to teaching Labor and Health Economics, she teaches Data Analysis courses to Economics majors and graduate students. She is about to complete her online teaching certificate through the Online Learning Consortium. Next she will be taking some online courses in data visualization, to help her students learn this important skill.

Catherine Ortiz

Hi Christy,

Well, that was intriguing! I had no idea how complicated risk aversion was! Great video; as bad as I am at math, I could actually follow it quite well.

I found it *very* interesting that the availability of videos did not really affect attendance. That has been a major concern of mine in terms of testing out a hybrid or flipped class arrangement for our lower level courses, so that is good to know.

Finally: Thank you so very much for all of the wonderful links!! I am so going to check these out! 🙂
- Christy Spivey
  
  Thanks Cathy! I only posted a handful of videos this semester. In the future when I post more I will pay attention to attendance again.
Stephanie Binger Rasmussen

HI Christy,

You noted that the quizzes/questions can’t be converted when creating an mp4 version of the videos. How do you make the videos available to students so they have access to the quizzes/questions?
- Christy Spivey
  
  Hi Stephanie,
  
  Office Mix integrated with Blackboard, and the mixes are stored by Office Mix. Here is how to integrate it, which allows you to track grades: https://mix.office.com/en-us/Lti/UsingBlackboard
Kiva Harper

Christy did you find that your students watched the videos outside of class? Did you have more class time for other things as a result?
- Christy Spivey
  
  Hi Kiva,
  Yes, most watched them. This semester I only posted a handful of videos. I didn’t implement a flipped model this semester, though I would like to do a partially flipped model in the future. So, it was really more of a reinforcement of what we did in class.
nakiaspope

Your project (and all the nice links) are a good testimony for Office Mix. I know you say you’re not grading the embedded assessments, but do you have any way of checking if the students have done them at all. (If you address this above and I missed it, I am sorry).
- Christy Spivey
  
  Hi Nakia,
  Yes! You can see who watched the mix, how much time each person spent on each slide, each person’s answers to quiz or poll questions, and how many attempts to get it right. You can export these analytics to Excel, or, if you integrate Office Mix with Blackboard, the grades can go straight to Blackboard! Congrats, BTW!
Kim Breuer

Very impressed with how Office Mix looks. I have students preparing video presentations for their end of year projects and have passed on your helpful hints to them.
- Christy Spivey
  
  Thanks, Kim! I think it’s a user-friendly option for students! Easier than I expected it to be!
Alex Hunnicutt

Office mix seems like a very attractive product. I am glad to read that the students responded well with it and experienced relatively little difficulty. Do you think this class turned out better than classes where you did not use this?
- Christy Spivey
  
  Hi Alex,
  Hard to say, since I did not use it as extensively as I plan to in the future, and I did not assess whether better outcomes resulted. But at least the students did respond well, so that’s a start. I think it’s attractive because it really accomplishes all I need in one package, it’s free, and it’s integrated with PowerPoint.
Jenny Roye

I think this is great! Love the interactivity of the whiteboard . is the whiteboard part of Office Mix? I have not had a chance to play with it much…
- Christy Spivey
  
  Hi Jenny,
  Yes, do you mean where the quiz questions were inserted? That is part of Office Mix. You can create all kinds of questions/polls. You can also insert Khan Academy and some other interactive material.