Title: 8.3 Video & Flash
Course: Certificate in Online Education

Using video

Video can be a great way to demonstrate concepts which may be difficult to explain verbally or on the whiteboard. Or just to give students another point of view.

You could create your own videos, as we saw earlier in the course, using MovieMaker, Wink or other video editing software, but this may be time consuming. So an alternative is to use video that someone else has already taken the time and trouble to create. I'm sure you're already had some experience of the huge variety of videos on YouTube. Leaving aside the talking cats, music videos and children falling over, there are a huge number of clips relevant to your subject area. Outside YouTube there are many other video sites containing great, free and open source instructional videos, video lectures and much more.

Whether you create your own video or use an existing one, you'll need to decide whether to link to the existing video or upload the original file to your course and you'll need to make sure the video is in a format your students can easily use (as we saw with audio files). The rest of this section describes the pros and cons of different approaches and the some of the various video formats available.

Linking or embedding?

Probably the simplest way to add a video to your course is simply to add a link to the webpage containing the video, as you would do to link to any other webpage.

Here is a link to a video in YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

This works, but it's not the best that we can do. We could take this a step further and copy the 'embed' code from the YouTube page into our page so the video now appears in context:

Providing your system administrator has enabled the multimedia plugin filter (this is outside the scope of this course, so if you are having difficulty embedding videos, speak to your Moodle administrator), we can embed videos in Moodle almost anywhere we like.

But what if you've created your own video and you want to upload this into your course. Or perhaps your organisation blocks or restricts access to video streaming websites. How you can upload your videos into Moodle is the subject of the next page.

Uploading video

We can upload a video into our Moodle course in exactly the same way we would any other file. Moodle will recognise common video formats and your browser will use the most appropriate video player.

Here's how Moodle will indicate to students that it's a video file:

And here's the video playing within Moodle:

You can see this video being played back at: $@RESOURCEVIEWBYID*11169@$

Video files, even more so than images and audio, have the potential to be very large files. If you are in an environment where network or internet bandwidth is limited, then you will need to carefully consider how easy it will be for your students to reliably play back any videos you upload. Next we'll look at the different types of video format available, compression and which may be most suitable for you.

Video formats

When videos are produced they are usually encoded into a particular format. This means that to play them back you'll need to have the corresponding decoder installed on your computer. Perhaps when you've tried to pay a video you've been asked to install a codec. This is the decoder that you need to playback the file.

Some common video file formats are: AVI, WMV, MOV and MPG, you've probably heard of some of these before. When you create and embed or upload a video into your course, you'll need to consider which formats your students are likely to be able to play back easily. If all your students are using Windows operating system, then it's a safe bet that they'll be able to playback AVI and WMV files.

If some of your students are using a unix based operating system (such as Ubuntu), they'll need to install an extension to their browser to be able to playback WMV, AVI and some other video files.

Students will need to install Quicktime to playback MOV files, whether they are using Windows or other operating system.

So just because a video you've uploaded to your course will play perfectly well on your computer, doesn't mean it will on the systems your students are using. Before you decide on a particular video format, it's worthwhile finding out what video formats will play on the computer your students are likely to be using to access your course. Otherwise you might find a lot of complaints from your students.

One format that is said to be installed on over 97% of the worlds computers (so is likely to cover the computer your students use) is Flash Video (FLV). We'll look at this next.

Flash

Flash Video (FLV), as we mentioned on the previous page, is said to play on nearly all the world computers. In fact, the videos that we have used and linked to in this course are all FLV files, as are YouTube videos.

FLV files may be embedded within a ShockWave Flash (SWF) player. The SWF player provides the environment in which the video is played back, determining the size of the video on the page, the play/pause and volume controls. The video we looked at earlier uses Moodle's SWF player to playback the video.

If you have the FLV multimedia filter enabled on your Moodle site, then when ever you link to an FLV file, Moodle will automatically embed this into the SWF player for playback online. If you're not sure whether the filter is enabled on your Moodle, then ask your Moodle administrator to check for you.