No matter what video format is used in a classroom, the main goal is to ensure that teachers and students have access to current, relevant, curriculum-related, engaging videos for every grade level.
Video streaming vendors provided information on their products’ content. They noted how many videos their service included and broke them down by grade cluster and subject areas. They also gave the total numbers for video segments and digital images and indicated, if they had them, how many audio files were in the library. They indicated how many videos had closed captioning, and they outlined correlations to BC curriculum. Finally, they noted their plans for additions to their video libraries and remarked on some of the special features (such as teacher’s guides, clip art, quizzes and encyclopedia articles) each service offers.
In their review last fall, ERAC’s team examined and compared the content offered by the four video services. They examined the services’ libraries, to try to determine if there was sufficient choice at every age and across the curriculum. They considered the quality of a selection of the services’ videos, both in terms of content and production values. They also viewed videos and gauged them against the services’ recommended age ranges.
The reviewers noted that while the MonD collection was lacking in both quantity and quality of videos, it is the only one that allows the user to “cherry-pick” which titles he or she wishes to purchase. They said that the Discovery Education Streaming has the largest video collection, but many of those titles are old (pre-2000), poor quality, or do not support the BC curriculum. In terms of quality, BC curriculum-correlated videos, clips and other content available, Learn360 is ahead of the other services. CCC! has plans to add significant numbers of recent titles to its collection this year, which would greatly improve its current collection.
