Christina Heikkila

Adding video to your online course is an easy way to make your content more engaging. You can make videos yourself, or you can use videos that others have shared. In this example, I’ll show how to embed video from the popular Google Video site. In another post, I’ll show how to do it with video from YouTube.

Firs, find the video you want to show your students. Go to the website video.google.com and enter keywords in the search box.

NOTE: many of the videos you will find on Google Video are actually on other sites such as YouTube. In that case, please follow the directions for embedding YouTube video in another post on this site. Only continue with these directions below if the source of the video is ‘video.google.com’.

Once you have selected a video that you want to share with your students, look for and click the “Email-Embed” button to the right of the video playback window. (If it just says Email and not Email-Embed, then the video’s author doesn’t want the video to be embedded on other websites.) Click the Embed HTML link, and a box will appear with HTML code:

In your Blackboard course, create a new item (course document, assignment, announcement, whatever), type whatever explanatory text you’d like to appear with the video, and then select the <> icon on the editing toolbar to switch into code view:

Back in Google Video, select all the code in the box:

and paste it into your Blackboard item:

Now save, and you’re done! Here is the finished view from the student’s perspective:

Adding video to your online course is an easy way to make your content more engaging. You can make videos yourself, or you can use videos that others have shared. In this example, I’ll show how to embed video from the popular YouTube site. In another post, I’ll show how to do it with video from Google Video.

(NOTE: see the warning at the bottom of this tutorial about problems with editing Blackboard posts with embedded YouTube videos. You may wish to use videos from Google Video instead.)

First, find the video you want to show your students. Go to the website www.youtube.com and enter keywords in the Search box.

Once you have selected a video that you want to share with your students, look to the right of the video, in the gray box. You will see two sections, one called URL, and one called Embed. (NOTE: The embed area may say “Embedding disabled by request” – this means that the author of the video doesn’t want their content embedded in other webpages. In this case, you can still use the video by linking to it with the URL, but it will not appear like it is part of your Blackboard course.)

There is also a small link near the Embed section that says “customize”, which you can use to change how the embedded video will appear – you can change the colors and select whether to show a full border around the video, for instance.

In your Blackboard course, create a new item (course document, assignment, announcement, whatever), type whatever explanatory text you’d like to appear with the video, and then select the “<>” icon on the editing toolbar to switch into code view:

Back in YouTube, click in the Embed textbox to highlight all the code inside that box:

and paste it into your Blackboard item:

Now save, and you’re done! Here is the finished view from the student’s perspective:

NOTE: One word of caution – if you ever need to go back and edit the Blackboard item (change wording, available dates, etc), Blackboard will break the embed code and the video will no longer work. So if you are going to edit an item with an embedded YouTube video, you should be prepared to recreate the embed code by re-copying it from the YouTube site or recopying it if you have saved it somewhere (like in a Word document). This problem does not happen with Google Video, so you may wish to use video from that source instead.