Improve accessibility and lower your inclusivity threshold.
Increase student activity with direct, visual and personalised interaction between the lecturer and their students.
Table of Content
- Improve accessibility and lower your inclusivity threshold.
- Increase student activity with direct, visual and personalised interaction between the lecturer and their students.
- Table of Content
- Enhanced learning with Vialog
- Education is changing
- Introducing Vialog
- Enhanced learning
- How Vialog provides value for education
- The Vialog suite for Education
- Accessibility
- Impact on environment and society
- FAQ
- Let's get started!
Enhanced learning with Vialog
Vialog's innovative video discussion tool allows students to interact with the course material and enhances remote teaching and learning.
Education is changing
Over 2M students in the UK have been affected by the move to online learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Students have found it more difficult to engage with classes online than face-to-face.
The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted 2.38M students within the UK higher education sector, with universities facing a £2.6B loss of revenue and the loss of 30K jobs.
Two- thirds of students report that they have insufficient contact with their lecturers. During the first semester of remote learning, there has been an 11% drop in the number of students who feel that they are able to access online learning sufficiently to complete their studies. The number of students rating online provision as being of good quality has also dropped by 10%.
Introducing Vialog
Vialog's innovative video discussion tool allows students to interact with the course material and enhances remote teaching and learning.
Enhanced learning
Increase the number of interactions students have with course material online.
Vialog is building an easy-to-use interactive video tool to address the changing needs in digital learning environments and to ease the increased workload of academics with improved teaching outputs.
Vialog is an asynchronous video tool that increases interactions between students and teachers. With accessibility features like video transcripts and thematic bundling of questions the tool also helps educators ease their workload.
Transform physical classes into virtual classes.
Lecturers need support to deliver courses in an engaging and effective way and to see who is active in the course while ensuring that all students have an equal chance of learning.
Vialog increases student activity with direct, visual and personalised interaction between the lecturers and their students. The tool contributes to students feeling they are getting higher value out of their studies.
How Vialog provides value for education
Ask and respond to students
Students can submit short (<1 min) videos that are directly linked to an exact second of any lecture video, allowing lecturers to respond to the entire class.
These 'timed comments' are micro-videos that are linked thematically on specific parts of lecture videos. This helps students search for topics and work together to complete course material.
Read More about collaboration
Vialog is a collaborative video discussion tool for the higher education. It enhances the opportunity of students to interact with their lecturers and other students during online learning. This allows remote learning in higher education to be more communal. Peer-Assisted Learning (PAL) ensures that less "students are being left behind in the rush for online innovation" (OfS)
Vialog allows peer-assisted distance learning so that completing courses are easier and more collaborative. With Vialog the videos of lectures (recorded on platforms such as Panopto, Blackboard Collaborate) are delivered using a many-to-many communication format.
Discuss lectures anytime
Being able to attach video comments to learning materials improves the searchability of lecture content and lets students 'raise their hands' when questions arise. This enables lecturers to respond more effectively by easily referring to relevant material.
Asynchronous tools aid remote learning by increasing the number of student interactions with course material, teachers and their peers.
Read More about async
Vialog offers asynchronous interactions that provide enhanced access to learning materials and a flexible learning experience. Students can use the tool for a discussion after video content or for any number of reflection tasks or sharing opportunities.
Lecturers can extend their pre-recorded course materials to improve engagement with distance learners, and students, who are increasingly studying from home with less interaction and more distraction than ever.
Be available but save time with FAQ
Vialog's tool can be easily used in any LMS, like Moodle, Blackboard and Canvas to enhance interactivity. Learning management systems can be populated with student-generated unique videos to match class materials with a virtual group experience.
Read more about the videos in LMS
Using videos, lecturers can develop a richer understanding of each students' situation, mental health status and behaviour patterns, and can help them better cope with isolation.
Lecturers can form a closer relationship with their groups using video noticeboards inside their existing Learning Management Systems.
The Vialog suite for Education
Accessibility
All students have to have an equal chance of accessing the learning materials.
Asynchronicity
Asynchronicity occurs when learning does not happen in the same place or at the same time for everyone. It reduces inequality between students who may have different access to resources and variable time commitments. The asynchronous format accommodates different schedules and time zones, making learning more interactive and accessible from any location.
Transcripts
Vialog provides automated transcripts for the async video discussions. Vialog's machine-assisted transcripts help lecturers meet the UK accessibility requirements for public sector bodies (last updated in June 2020) of pre-recorded audio and video.
For sight-impaired students, the audio of the Vialog videos is searchable with the machine-assisted speech-to-text transcripts. (coming soon)
Keyword suggestions enable lecturers to group and annotate videos. Machine assisted speech-to-text keyword tagging is a highly challenging technical element that is being introduced to address the thematic bundling and the accessibility requirements. (coming soon)
Equality, diversity and inclusion
Democratic e-learning provides the opportunity to enhance inclusivity. Compared with text communication, videos highlight better cultural characteristics, such as gestures, language and interaction styles. Collaborative video interactions can increase participants' awareness, understanding and competence, together with other sociocultural characteristics, and can improve the confidence of participating students.
Digital divide
To use the Vialog tool, students only need a camera-enabled device connected to the internet. Using the tool does not require any further software to be downloaded or installed. Once students are signed in to their Learning Management System, they are able to watch and respond to class recordings using the Vialog tool.
Impact on environment and society
We are environmentally conscious and factor that into our decision making.
The Climate Positive Discussion promise
We believe climate change is everyone's business and Vialog is proud to be taking concrete steps to protect our environment. As part of our core company values, we voluntarily offset our greenhouse gas emissions making Vialog a Net Zero emissions company since 2020.
In an effort to go above and beyond, we have also started to offset employee emission and some of our third-party infrastructure greenhouse gas emissions in 2021.
On top of all, we have recently launched Vialog's one thread one tree program, committing to plant one tree for each new discussion thread on Vialog.
Learn more:
Impact on society en large
Vialog is helping high performing remote institution to make impact utilising remote and async methods. Vialog offers a tool to level up and replicate things that institutions used to have in physical space.
Knowledge exchange transfer
Vialog is a tool to help institutions beyond their research agenda, sharing their knowledge with all levels of society. The Vialog team is dedicated to sharing knowledge and establishing discussion between education institutions, the industry and general audience and have established Experts' Vision Chat's to this end.
To read more about Vialog's Science Communication please visit:
Contributing to employability
In the age of remote work, camera confidence can further graduates' ability to secure and maintain employment. Using Vialog improves soft skills like communication, criticality, ability to ask and respond to questions. The tool improves thematic social networking for institutions and provides visibility to active learners.
FAQ
Is Vialog GDPR compliant?
Yes, 100%. You can read our
Some important highlights:
- We allow our users to download and or delete their data from the platform (here is the direct link).
- We do not store sensitive user information in the Database, users are identified with non-guessable userIDs.
- We make it easy for anyone to unsubscribe from any discussion updates any time.
- You can read more about our Data Principles here or you can confidently contact Vialog’s Data Protection Officer at dpo@vialog.app email.
Does Vialog increase costs to our VLE and is our vendor capable of hosting Vialog?
All VLE and LMS are capable to post custom html codes and that is all that is technically required for Vialog.
The embedded Vialog tools are using Vialog's own infrastructure for the full lifecycle of the videos. Vialog costs include processing, storing and streaming of videos. Nothing is hosted by your VLE or LMS so your costs in Moodle (or whichever system you use) will stay the same.
Will each student / staff member need to sign up and create an account?
Students do not need to sign up for an account for participating in a video discussion. Anyone who can connect to the discussion will be able to watch and participate with a camera enabled device. As Vialog does not do anonymous user tracking (fingerprinting), the analytics are based on browser loads and sessions.
Only the Hosts need to create a Vialog account which are likely to be your staff. They will be able to moderate, manage and publish the submitted videos in seconds while ensuring content quality and coherency.
How does Vialog integrate with my Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) like Moodle?
Vialog discussions can be embedded on any VLE /LMS platform with a simple html code. Here is guide for Moodle.
Vialog takes care of all the processing, storing and streaming for you. Lecturers can share it with their course participants directly or by embedding it on Moodle.
Video discussions visibility can be controlled on a per-domain basis, providing a fine-grain whitelisted on a discussion level.
How this is presented to an individual student?
Students, once signed in see the embedded Vialog modules in their learning environments similarly to how they would see any other content such as Panopto videos. Students do not need to sign in or download any additional software to watch and respond to videos on Vialog.
How can lecturers deliver this, whom to or for?
Lecturers can decide to embed this to any other webpage as well, they only need to whitelist that domain for the relevant Discussion's Settings on their Dashboard. Discussions will stay private and only available for the people accessing that website.
For public discussions (for example School introductions or public testimonials), Lecturers can also use the Vialog Share Links to share a unique URL that anyone can see even without being directly embedded to any website.
Let's get started!
To get started or know more about how Vialog can help your organisation, please contact David on david@vialog.app.
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