Standalone Simulated Live for Online Life Track / Growth Track

Technology Devops
#1

I’m wanting to have a page that has a video player that contains a player that plays a simulated live video so everyone on the page is seeing the same content at the same time (within 30 seconds or so if possible). I don’t want it to be able to pause, seek, change speed, etc. Although I’d love captions to work if possible.

I can do this all day long with Living As One for our main services, but this needs to be at the same time as another service that we stream with LAO.

I can also do this with ChOP, but I’m not familiar enough to know how much of the page I can control (i.e. I need to hide everything I can, but have a button to direct people to fill out a form so we know they took that lesson). I feel this should be simple, but since I’m so used to scheduling in LAO I’m over-complicating it in my head and was wondering what others might suggest.

#2

Yes, you can do this with ChOP. If you use a Vimeo or Youtube video (each of which can have captions), it will play it Simulated Live. If I was doing this with ChOP (v4), I would set up the service with settings like this:

  • Duration set to a few minutes longer than the video length
  • Public Chat disabled
  • Create a Moment to link to your form and turn on Automatically Post and set it to post 30-90 seconds before the video ends

All that said, if you’re not doing any sort of live interaction (chat), why force it into a time-limited “live” format? We do our Four Steps (front-end assimilation class) entirely on-demand with a form to affirm that they watched the video. Totally understand if there is a good reason for it, but we see people engaging with Four Steps and another one of our on-demand classes at all times of the day.

#3

Our primary reason for wanting it simulated live is we are having Zoom meetings directly afterward, so we’ll have a link to the zoom meeting locator in the Thank You message of filling out the form (we’ll have different zoom meetings for different campuses).

Thanks, I’ll work with our ChOP guy here to see about getting another one set up.

Out of curiosity, how do you track engagement of your on-demand classes?

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#4

That makes sense! So it’s more of a “watch this video then we’re all going to discuss it” kind of thing without relying on trying to play a video in an online meeting?

Blackpulp built us an online courses system that is integrated into our Ministry Platform portal. We define a course, which has classes, which each have content and optionally assignments. The user clicks a button for each class to indicate that they have viewed the video and done the assignments, which marks attendance in an event for tracking. So when I say “engaging” I mean “indicated that they completed a class.”

We decided this was enough and didn’t want to ensure, using technology, that people viewed the whole video because in order to complete Four Steps you have to do an in-person or video meeting with a pastor. There’s not a quiz, but it’s pretty easy for us to discern whether they actually did the work or not.

I haven’t looked a numbers recently, but leadership saw enough of a difference last fall between in-person attendance and online engagements that they stopped offering the class every month in-person and mostly direct people to do it on-demand.