Vialogues is a great tool for teachers looking to integrate Web media into traditional, flipped, or blended classes. Consider uploading popular content to engage critical thinking at key moments, posting lectures and using Vialogues for students to ask and answer peer questions, or encouraging students to share their own content for peer feedback.
Teachers looking for ways to track student engagement will definitely enjoy pointing students to specific parts of a video to prompt an asynchronous Web discussion. Another interesting way to use the tool would be as a note-taking device for video lectures. Students could work alone or in groups to annotate lecture content to study and/or to highlight key topics.
Continue readingVialogues, from EdLab at Teachers College, Columbia University, is a free platform for sharing, annotating, and discussing Web-based videos. The simple interface is easy to use: Start by adding a video from a computer, cloud storage (Dropbox, etc.), or streaming sites, such as YouTube or Vimeo. Videos are nested into a Vialogues page that contains a timecode-stamped discussion thread.
Comments or polls can be added as discussion prompts, and users can weigh in with their own ideas. Videos can have multiple moderators to edit/delete comments or add polls. There's also an instant embed code, so it can be easily used with other websites and LMSs that don’t have a built-in video discussion feature.
The Vialogues platform offers a step up from traditional video-hosting sites, providing students and teachers with the ability to add their own comments to specific timecodes in a video. It’s also pretty nice to be able to click a comment’s timecode and go directly to that part of the video to see what people are talking about, although unfortunately that feature doesn’t seem to work on every page. Privacy features enable Vialogues to be limited to a specific class or group, and polling adds a light form of interactivity to the videos.
While teachers won’t get analytics about individual students, the polls can still be a good way to start or enhance a discussion. Analytics do show comment density, so teachers can see which parts of a video created the greatest reaction or caused the most confusion. Overall, it’s a clean platform with stable features. Take note, however: Long comment threads can’t be condensed, so you may have to do quite a bit of scrolling to see the comments at the end.
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