YouTube Jisc CETIS MASHe

The 2013 New Year’s greetings, from the French advertising and public relations company Publicis Groupe by their CEO Maurice Lévy is making multiple appearances in my circles

v. clever use of youtube – try pausing, fast forwarding, or viewing full screen: youtube.com/user/PublicisG… rather meta.

— George Siemens (@gsiemens) December 13, 2012

When I saw it my immediate thought was how did they do it? In the official press release they say:

It’s just one of the many very human interpretations of the standard YouTube functionality taken for granted today.

Looking for YouTube player functionality left me scratching my head. Looking at the source gave a big clue:

… basically the entire video area including title and controls is an embedded iframe. This allows Publicis Groupe to create their own Flash based player with custom functionality for pause, play etc.

To get the iframe into their YouTube channel they used YouTube’s Custom tab settings which are available on Branded Channels.

Simple but very effective.

Via Doug Holton I spotted that there is a new YouTube beta feature to add multiple choice questions (MCQ) to your Youtube videos. Those who have already taken a course on Coursera (surely everyone has now ;), will know the video with MCQ is one of the staples. From the ‘Video Questions Editor Beta’ page it says:

Description

This is an opt-in beta for a simple Video Questions Editor on YouTube. Through this editor you can setup multiple questions to be displayed on top of your video during playback that a viewer can answer.

How can I use this feature?

The editor itself can be found on the video edit page, on the edit bar. After you have added several questions and the users have viewed them, you can see a summary of the interaction your users had with them through the analytics page, within the Annotations section.

Disclaimer

The feature represents work in progress, there is no plan for long-term support of the feature and may be removed at any time without prior notification. Your comments will help us improve and perfect the mixtures we’re working on. So jump in, play around and send your feedback directly to the brains behind the scenes.

The page also includes a link to opt-in to the beta.

If you do when you go to edit one of your videos you’ll get a ‘Questions’ button

Add question

Clicking on this lets you enter your question:

Question entry

Unfortunately when I click on save it hangs on ‘Your changes are being saved…’.

Bigger picture

It’s a shame that this feature doesn’t work yet. It’s interesting to put this development into the context of Google’s recent open source release of Course Builder, which was used as the technology behind their Power Searching with Google online course (xMOOC). So is Google trying to rock the boat in the mass online education market?