Videos have always been recognized as one of the big players that would revolutionize the future of elearning. True to the hype, more and more companies are adopting videos as their primary course delivery tool. The advantages of creating courses as videos are many and varied. In terms of cost effectiveness, videos can range from very modest ones to very ambitious productions depending on the tools and budget at hand. This luxury is not afforded by many of the other course formats which may require the purchase of an insanely expensive tool in the first place.
Another obvious advantage is that virtually no effort is required to optimize video courses between platforms. A video of a certain resolution will play on almost every device that supports the resolution - whether it be a computer, tablet or a mobile phone. This is not the case with courses designed in other course authoring tools which will have to be customized for every type of device out there. So considering the device friendly nature of videos, an investment in video courses will also in a way address some of the mobile learning concerns as well. One of the few disadvantages of videos is that they haven't been as interactive in the past like the courses produced by some course authoring tools. With the popularity of interactive video format on the rise, videos have started to catch up in that area. Videos can be used as standalone courses or in association with other course resources.
Considering all this, we are proud to report that we have been giving special care to how our system handles videos. Our system supports adding a video directly as a url course or as a direct upload to the system. Our system supports a wide variety of video formats like flash videos, wmvs, mp4s, avi's etc. All these videos can be directly uploaded to the system or played remotely through a url. Our course authoring tool, Techniq Portfolio also provides the ability to import a video into a course along with other resources like powerpoint presentations, images etc.
The Techniq Portfolio also provides the ability to embed a YouTube video, stream videos hosted in remote locations like Amazon, import a Citrix or Webex recording etc. In addition to all these features, we provide a 'Related Videos' feature using which external video resources which are related to a course content can be accessed from the course details page itself. Also, our early adoption of HTML 5 ensures that videos can be played on all HTML5 supported browsers without the headache of installing a host of plugins to make them work. As always, we will be working on developing new features and improving the existing ones.
So stay tuned!
Contributed by Vinod Rajendran, Vitalect Customer Support
Contributed by Vinod Rajendran, Vitalect Customer Support
