Jocasta Williams (Echo 360)

When Dr Katya Pechenkina was re-designing content for the capstone unit in Swinburne University of Technology’s Graduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching (Higher Education), her goal was not simply to boost engagement metrics but to support self-regulation and reflection for busy professional educators.

The capstone sits at the conclusion of a four-unit graduate certificate and brings together a diverse group of academics and professional staff. It’s a project-focused unit; Katya describes it as a space where students “apply what they have learned from previous units in the context of their own professional teaching practice to develop a learning and teaching project – one that may have to do with evaluating their impact as academics, perhaps changing an approach based on student feedback, or maybe introducing an innovation into their own teaching and measuring the impact of that innovation”.

Katya characterises her students as ‘pragmatic’ and ‘highly motivated’, with many teaching full-time or working full-time alongside academics in supporting roles, and most are looking for guidance that is efficient and immediately useful. She says that “with very busy professional learners, you must make decisions about what they will want to engage with, and what will be of the highest value to them in their learning journey. They’re selective and deliberate, and they won’t do something if they perceive it might be a waste of their time. So the question for us as educators of this cohort is how to design this experience to make it impactful to their learning and enable them to succeed”.

Those realities shaped her decision to use interactive quiz videos as one of the unit’s core learning scaffolds.

The short, scenario-based clips were embedded in the LMS, and interactive elements were inserted at key points to pause the video and prompt reflection or decision-making. They offered tailored feedback rather than generic answers, helping students plan their projects step by step. “I wanted to create something of value to this very practical, very success-oriented group of learners,” Katya says, “and to help them self-regulate as learners and to encourage them to reflect better in the context of their own teaching practice.”

Clip 1: Katya talking about creating interactive media

Interaction as a marker of deeper learning

In designing the videos, Katya drew on principles of effective video pedagogy – that ‘shorter is better’ and ‘more personal is better than overproduced’ – while experimenting with quiz placement and feedback design. She placed the first video early in the semester, once students had a grasp of the project requirements: “I wanted to place that video as early in the semester as possible, but late enough to ensure that students had learned at least the basic information about the unit, what the projects are, and what we want them to accomplish during the semester.”

The interactive prompts were placed in the video’s timeline where Katya felt that students would most benefit from a moment of reflection, and she found that placing questions throughout the video made more sense that clustering them at the end, acknowledging that “sometimes students won’t watch an entire video to the end, or they’ll finish the video and not bother with the questions, so placing the activities in the flow of the content makes a difference.”

After running the unit, Katya analysed the learning analytics to see whether interaction mattered. What she found didn’t really surprise her. “Students’ engagement with interactive videos had a stronger statistical link to their performance in the unit and the grades that they achieved, and other markers as well.” Traditional LMS metrics – page views and click counts – were weaker predictors. “To participate in an interactive video involves a higher level of cognitive engagement,” she explains. “It requires you to have a higher motivation for learning, and it’s not as passive as just measuring visits to a page.”

Clip 2: Katya talking about learner analytics

Practical and professional impact

The shift from long recordings to short, interactive clips had benefits for her, not just for her students. Although the initial scripting and set-up took time, Katya says EchoVideo made integration straightforward: “It’s very easy to use EchoVideo as a tool, it’s intuitive and aesthetically pleasing, and it integrates well with our LMS”. Once created and shared, the videos reduced routine questions from students, allowing her to focus on higher-value conversations about the substance of their projects. The change freed her to concentrate on “the nitty-gritty of the projects rather than the administrative aspects of the unit.”

She also sees potential for scale. Katya believes that interactive videos can provide benefits for student learning across all class sizes and all discipline areas through structured, just-in-time guidance that fosters self-regulation where personalised feedback isn’t feasible. Embedding videos at consistent milestones means they remain relevant across unit iterations and can be re-used without losing pedagogical impact.

Designing engagement that matters

Katya’s work provides good insight into what ‘engagement’ should mean in professional education. For her, it’s not about attendance or click-through rates but about creating authentic, timely moments that prompt reflection and action. Short, scenario-driven interactive videos achieved that: they encouraged self-regulation, produced richer indicators of student success, and reduced routine workload for teaching staff.

Her advice for others designing similar experiences is straightforward: align interactive activities with project milestones, keep videos concise and authentic, prioritise quality over quantity, and design prompts that ask learners to think rather than recall. When used this way, interactive video becomes less about monitoring engagement and more about enabling deeper, sustainable learning.

Katya’s next step is a second research phase involving student surveys and interviews to explore their lived experiences of interactive video, and we’ll definitely be sharing her findings when they’re ready! In the meantime, Katya will be presenting her paper entitled ‘Quiz Me If You Can: What Interactive Video Engagement Data Tells Us About Achievement’ at ASCILITE 2025 on Monday 1 December, and we hope to see you there!