Video Control

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OK, I know someone has came across this issue. You have a learner viewing a video in the your title, and they select the viewer controller and move it to near the end or the end to hurry up and get past the video.

We would like to stop or prevent the learner from doing this or at best track if they did perform this action, and if so then display a message indicating they must view the entire video. We do not want to but a transparent button over that part of the video controller. We want them to have control over what they are viewing however we need to ensure they view the entire video before proceeding to the next page.

Any ideas?

Discussion (18)

I'm curious to know if there's a solution out there as well. I would have to think it'll be HTML, CSS, or Javascript based answer. Maybe the seek feature? I know you can make a player seekable but can you take that ability away? I'll bring your question to a couple of the more knowledgeable coders in the Community and see if they have any solutions.

Events! That's a great internal solution I didn't think of right away. Thanks John!

In the past, we have had users place a transparent button over just the "scrubber" area of the controller, which will work in published code (not in the run or preview mode though). If that is not a solution, the best way would be to choose not to show a controller, and perhaps put your own play and pause buttons under the video, and have an "On done" action that enables the next button.

Alternatively, to enable scrubbing, but not allow the user to miss any part of the video, you could add many events in the video, all of which must occur before enabling the next button. The user would have to hit each event, therefore see the entire video. This would be a long manual process for every video though, and not my favorite way to do it.

I totally agree with Sergey. This issue came up with my company also and it is often difficult to help the customer understand that you are not short changing the content by allowing the learner to have control. That is a part of adult learning that we sometimes forget but need to get creative with in our design.

Sergey and Dana, I totally agree with you about forcing a learner to watch a video is not good practice, normally we do not employ this method, however the client insist on having this feature. Segey, your suggestion listed is basically my plan with the exception of having the quiz after wards, but I do see a benefit of offering the quiz before the video.

I believe with the learner viewing multiple short clips about 5 to 7 min long they would be strongly inclined to view each video clip entirely. Last night I was thinking about this topic and how I was going to design this and I decided to use the events function and sync each video clip to a series of set percentage to be displayed as the learner progresses through the video clip. Tie this in with status tracking and reporting for each section until all sections have been completed. Your thoughts?

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I do agree with Sergey, but because i also encountered clients that insisted on having something setup in some specific way that i didnot agree with i am working on a setup to get this done.

So far 'timers' seem to do the trick. A timer gets started when clicking the video, paused when pausing/stopping the video. Biggest issue to get working is the scrubber. I am building a complete custom player, so i can control all elements by script.

When i got a proper working one, will upload it.

Kind regards,

Math

In most cases, forcing your learners to watch a video that they wouldn't watch on their own is poor instructional design and does nothing but annoys them. The only reason for doing so is compliance with govt regulations that demand certain number of minutes of video watched etc.

Suggestion:

- split the long video into small chunks

- create a quiz to check the understanding of each chunk

- offer the quiz first

- then make some of the short videos compulsory (and non-skippable) based on the quiz results

Having said that, I'd love to be able to see the "Percentage of video watched" as a variable / property for every video / media clip, especially for analytics on whether people even watch it before going to the next page.

Do you not have the option to not use a controller on your video?

Under the video properties in the playback options is the controller drop down. None should be an option for you which would not show a player.

No-Player-Skin.png

I made a play/pause button with the Toggle Play/Pause action.

I'd like to see an action that would allow the viewer to jump back 10 seconds though. That'd be really useful!

play-pause-action.png

I’ve added this thread to a Lectora suggestion. If you could please go up vote and leave a comment specifically asking what you’d like to see that would be great!

Thanks!

http://community.trivantis.com/forums/topic/enhance-video-controls/

Great discussion on this topic! I also believe that the learner should have full control over video playback.

But alas, I too have a client asking to disable seeking forward. Are there any methods to achieve this with the new video player? Perhaps some custom javascript? I would want the user to still be able to seek backwards.

Thanks for any updates on this!

Richard

Thanks Jason and Darrel for the CSS suggestion. This would be the quickest fix and a good solution for now.

Add the following to an external cascading style sheet and then add it to your project using an HTML Extension Cascading Style Sheet.

.mejs-controls .mejs-time-rail span, .mejs-controls .mejs-time-rail a {

pointer-events: none

}

This will prevent scrubbing but still allow all other controls.

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undefined - That pointer:none might be an even better solution for my courses. Is that usable on any of the items in the player, ie the Play/Pause/Stop button? One thing that came up with my model is that even though there is no display for the play button, you can still click and tab to it.

You could "remove" the scrubber bar from the player using a customized CSS. I did something similar with a player I customized by removing the play/pause and closed captioning buttons. Off the top of my head I can't remember what the scrubber was called in the CSS, but you can look through the trivantis-player.css and find it. I THINK it was .mejs-time-rail. If you use display: none, it effectively hides the time-rail.

While mine was for audio, the same file controls the video time rail as well.

Here's the link with an sample zip near the end of the thread:

http://community.trivantis.com/forums/topic/more-audio-player-captions-questions/

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How about "forcing" the user to view the video in its entirety the first time they get to the video (by having a auto-start video without a controller) and then, after they have viewed the video at least once replace the video with one with controller bar?

While it's a reasonable solution, I would avoid having a video (or audio, for that matter) without some controls on the page for a couple of design reasons:

  1. What happens if the learner needs to pause the video for some reason? It may be generally clear to us as developers that clicking on the video itself will pause, it may not be for a learner.
  2. Without a controller, a learner cannot turn on closed captions. There are learners in environments where listening to the audio is not an option, so they might use captions instead. Additionally, you would lose accessibility compliance, since there's no accommodation for the hearing impaired.

Even if the course does not require 508 compliance, better design allows learners multiple options. The ability to turn on closed captions is not only 508 compliant, but also valuable to all learners.

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