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TEDEd has introduced features that allow you to create customized online “lessons” with embedded questions and discussion features. TEDEd has been developing a library of free, short (usually 5-20 minutes), pithy videos on a wide range of academic topics, many of which are very suitable for college classrooms. Once you have created a TED account, you can use the new features to build a lesson around a video you’ve chosen, by adding contextual information, multiple choice or free-response questions, a discussion forum and links to additional TEDEd or YouTube videos. You get a link to the video that you can paste onto a Moodle page or share via email and any number of social media options. Students log in to the lesson and you can see stats about their engagement and question answers.

Please check out my sample lesson to see how this works. I created it by slightly customizing existing lessons other users had created around this video (which one can do by clicking the big, red “flip this lesson” button on any lesson). Once a few people have done the lesson I will be able to report on what the stats look like.

Note that anyone can create a lesson and share it with others — you don’t need any special instructor account. This means one could also assign students to create lessons around topical videos and post them for the class. You would need to add them to your lessons to see student data, but it might also be interesting to assign each student the task of summarizing and reporting on answers to her lesson.