The trend of watching online videos to learn and understand topics has grown exponentially in the last few years, with the worldwide average touching the 40.4% mark in 2024.

Due to such an impactful reach, almost all industries have started incorporating videos for learning and development purposes. The education industry is no different, given its natural scope to adopt this technology. High-quality education coupled with digital technology has the power to develop human talent and nurture young minds for the opportunities arising on a global scale.

While there are a host of digital technologies impacting education, it is the video format that has emerged as the greatest agent of change. Interactive videos for education are among the most frequently used and reliable teaching aids in today’s virtual learning environment. They ensure effective and efficient learning for both students and teachers.

In this blog, we explore some key benefits of interactive videos, their applications, and how they can be used specifically in immersive learning for K12 students.

Table of Contents:

Why Do Interactive Videos Work for K12 Students?

Here’s why more and more K12 students and their instructors prefer using interactive video content.

1. Immersive and Engaging Learning

Students today continuously interact with the ever-changing digital ecosystem. Interactive materials like clickable quizzes, choose-your-own-adventure-style choices, and fun feedback keep students actively engaged with the material.

On a similar note, interactive videos are very immersive and are specifically designed to be engaging. Given that learners can be inconsistent at times, especially K12 students who have shorter attention spans, they are designed in a creative and captivating style to catch their attention and motivate them to watch and learn.

Videos facilitate collaboration, cater to different learning styles and abilities, increase engagement with the content, and ultimately improve learning outcomes. The best way to use videos in K12 education is to ensure that they are interactive in nature, allowing students to be active participants while learning.

2. Improved Retention and Understanding

Active learning is a prime example of better memory retention for kids. Students show more inclination towards interactive, clickable content than towards passively watching a video.

Videos have the potential to become the perfect companion for teachers. With the help of video clips, educators can impart a deeper understanding of concepts. Improving K12 learning outcomes is a major area of research in the education space. The research is centered on finding ways to make new skills, concepts, and information more graspable for students.

To maximize the effectiveness of video-based learning, students should be able to read and react, comprehend, analyze, and critique, and gain knowledge from videos.

3. Personalized Learning Paths

Interactive videos allow students the breathing space required to absorb course content. They are designed to offer branching, a feature that can take different learning paths based on the student’s choices or responses, and offer a suitable learning course for every learner.

4. Supports a Variety of Learning Styles

Students have their own ways of learning. Some prefer visual learning, while some are better at understanding auditory explanations.

Interactive videos let students choose from multiple learning styles, fostering a healthy learning ecosystem. They further provide K12 students with a certain sense of user control, allowing learners to design their own virtual learning environment and experience. This enables students to watch and learn at their own pace without any external pressure.

Teachers utilize various modalities, such as verbal explanations, drawing, and reading. Adding visual media to the list helps them build sound background knowledge in the students’ minds regarding any topic.

“Rather than trying to simplify information, amplifying the curriculum means finding as many ways as possible to make key information comprehensible.” – Pauline Gibbons, Education Researcher

5. Convenience and Flexibility

Besides the benefits mentioned above, interactive videos also offer great convenience to students and teachers. This is simply because they can be delivered virtually and are perfect for online and blended learning.

The Science Behind Video Learning

Why is video so effective for immersive learning? Did you know that our brain processes visuals about 60,000 times faster compared to text? That’s all the more reason why you should integrate educational videos into your curriculum.

A survey conducted by Huffpost indicates that videos are indeed impactful in the overall experience, education, and information retention. With the emergence of online learning, videos will continue to gain traction in the upcoming years.

According to an estimate provided by the same survey, about 49% of the respondents reported watching 6-20 educational videos every month. Consequently, K12 content developers are thus focused on creating a video-centric, inviting, engaging, and exciting environment just like Hulu and Netflix.

Successful Applications of Interactive Videos

Some examples of successful applications of using interactive videos in K12 classrooms are:

  • Flipped Classrooms: In flipped classrooms, students have the flexibility of watching video lessons at home and later participating in interactive workshops in class. By making the learning content easy to understand and interactive, educators make certain that all students are actively engaged in the course content.
  • Test Preparations and Review: Interactive videos help students prepare for tests. With embedded quizzes and decision-making exercises, students can keep practicing and review their performances in a test-like scenario.
  • Real-time Analytics for Teachers: Several platforms that support interactive videos enable teachers to use real-time analytics during online lessons. Teachers have access to all students’ performances and what they’re struggling with. This helps them personalize teaching methods for each student.
  • A Boon for the Hearing-Impaired: This is an overlooked benefit of using videos for improving K12 student learning outcomes. Hearing-impaired students rely on visual cues to study their curriculum. In that sense, videos with captions can offer them a better learning experience by keeping them engaged and energized.

Seven Ways to Use Interactive Videos in eLearning for K12 Students

Take a look at the seven ways you could introduce interactive video for eLearning purposes of K12 students:

1. Creating a Series of Video Clips

One of the best ways to use interactive videos and increase student engagement is by incorporating classroom videos in lesson plans. As an educator, you can plan your lesson around 2-6 video clips. These could either be relevant YouTube videos, videos that you have created, or previously used videos from other educators.

After you have presented the video clip to your class, you can then plan various interactive exercises, such as self-reflection, guided questions, or group discussions, to discuss the topic in detail. The idea here is to use several video clips related to a particular topic to enhance students’ understanding.

However, you should have a clear understanding of the news clip, documentary, or any other video clip and evaluate its impact on young minds before using it. Choose the most dynamic parts of the documentary, news segments, or films that you want your students to watch.

For instance, if you want to teach youngsters about the dark history of the Holocaust, you could decide to watch Schindler’s List with them. Now, since the movie has violent scenes, you have to be strategic about it, but not dismissive. You can decide to show select clips to the kids according to what’s appropriate for their age bracket.

2. Making Tutorials and How-to Videos

Another interesting way to use interactive videos in eLearning is by asking students to create detailed how-to videos.

For instance, you can ask your students to explain the concept of fractions or the process of photosynthesis. Students can do this on a whiteboard app, record their desktop screen as they do, and share it with their family and friends. These how-to videos are an excellent way to help you assess the learners and give feedback.

Videos in K12 education can also be used for demonstration, for example, a video of a science experiment. Rather than just reading and listening to the instructions, students can watch how a process works and then try it out themselves. These step-by-step demonstrations eliminate or minimize gaps in communication or understanding, allowing for greater learning.

3. Lesson Recaps

To ensure that every student pays attention in class, you can ask them to make/record a brief video recap of the lesson learned on a particular day.

Encourage students to present their learning creatively and concisely, and have them submit their videos via email, Google Classroom, or whichever mode is convenient.

Video recaps are an excellent way to assess student understanding of the concept and whether you need to revisit any specific topic before moving on to the next one.

Furthermore, videos allow students access to the lessons they have missed. This can be done through in-class recordings. But it may be that the instructor has to go on leave. In that case, they can create and upload videos and share the URL with the students so they get all the information they need, even when the teachers are absent.

4. Conducting Q&A Sessions

You can also let your students record their responses to a series of questions after watching an interactive video in class.

For instance, as your students watch and engage in an educational video, you can create a set of questions related to the topic. Students can answer these questions and send you a video response.

5. Keeping a Tab on Student Performance

Interactive videos can also be used to keep track of students’ performance and share it with them later. Some platforms allow monitoring user analytics, wherein the instructors can view students’ progress through all content.

Instructors can get information about where exactly students have stopped watching or are having difficulty processing information, and which part they keep going back to.

Leveraging this kind of interactive video analytics helps you understand what interests students and which parts of the video require more explanation.

6. Reflection

Yet another exciting video teaching strategy educators can leverage is to use some of the most powerful videos from YouTube or similar sites and get their students to reflect on them. It helps students develop their critical thinking skills and apply them in real life. This learning strategy has become quite popular in recent years.

However, it is important to remember here that the idea is not to let students simply consume the video and its content but to reflect on it at a deeper level. This means encouraging them to engage with the content emotionally and reflect on what they are watching and understanding from it.

For students to retain the information for extended periods, video learning should be combined with the writing of notes. This method is especially applicable if the video is packed with lots of information. Do not hesitate to pause the video in between, ask a few questions, and encourage them to take notes.

To be able to grade this assignment, you can either have students do a quick group discussion, sharing their thoughts, write an exit ticket, or have interested students share their reflections on what they have seen.

7. Bring Students Together for Collaborative Projects

Collaborative learning allows students to brainstorm along with their peers. This exercise helps build leadership and critical thinking skills in students.

Teachers can bring together students in small groups to plan and co-create a video project as a team. They can either create videos, record meetings, or simply upload audio files or pictures to complete the project. Delivering interactive videos is an easy and excellent way to make learning more engaging and fun for K12 students.

Instead of just listening to a lesson or reading about a subject, students can be asked to prepare a video-based research project. The students can easily find a wealth of information on any subject on the Internet. Videos in K12 education can be a good supplement, allowing students to discover their different strengths and see what they are capable of.

These videos encourage independent learning and also inculcate skills that will hold students in good standing on a global stage.

Additional Strategies for Immersive Learning

Beyond the core seven strategies, there are several other ways to leverage video for truly immersive learning experiences.

Virtual Field Trips

In a geography lesson, for instance, take your students for a virtual tour around the world without actually leaving the classroom. A virtual trip also frees you from the bounds of physical space and time. So you can take them to the Himalayas or the Alps, show the wildebeest migration in Kenya and Tanzania, or trace the route of Christopher Columbus to find the New World.

You can also organize virtual field trips to some of the greatest cities of the world, or even provide a complete perspective of the Renaissance period in Florence, Italy. No matter what the subject, virtual field trips make the lessons more real and relevant.

Role of AR/VR in Immersive Learning

We cannot really wrap up our discussion on the role of videos in enhancing the K12 learning outcomes without talking about AR/VR. One of the biggest problems that persists today is the lack of practical understanding among students, through no fault of their own. Sure, they have a lot of theoretical knowledge. Unfortunately, the education system is largely based on regurgitation instead of experiential learning.

The learning process for students can be reinforced using technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality. It is because AR/VR encourages individual empowerment, collaboration, asking of questions, and solving real-world problems by taking a more practical approach. This is what should be the foundation of authentic assessment. When you groom kids with experiential learning, they apply the same approach when they are out in the real world, solving real problems.

For instance, simulated videos that imitate and enhance reality are now being used to support learning. To explain how these work, take the case of a biology lesson on the functioning of the heart. A simulated video can show the students how the blood circulates in the four chambers of the heart.

Today, almost every student has a smartphone. All they have to do is download an AR app and point it to the text or image in the textbook that is linked to the simulated video.

In Conclusion

Using the strategies discussed above, you can maximize the impact of interactive videos in K12 classrooms and ensure that they serve as excellent teaching aids for teachers and students to connect and inspire each other.

Videos are instrumental in refining students’ creativity, cooperation, and K12 learning outcomes. They improve retention rates manifold and help students get clarity of concepts.

Technology may or may not be your forte, but you can always introduce it to your classrooms using engaging visual content solutions. Video learning in K12 education is more in tune with the evolving pedagogical practices to encourage independent learning in students while also enabling them to hone skills, capabilities, and behaviors for the global workplace.

Hurix Digital offers a digital content library for K12 students, with over 2500 interactive videos covering Math and Science. These videos are mapped to the global curriculum and are available in multiple languages. Students can leverage this K12 library to learn various Math and Science concepts in a simple and easy-to-understand manner.

Contact us now to learn how to leverage interactive videos for optimal eLearning results.