Behind the Build: Rethinking Video Quizzing

Who said creating — and maybe even taking — a video quiz can’t be fun?

ShareStream's screen for submitting a video quiz with a close-up of the confirmation card that appears after the quiz has been successfully submitted.

The ShareStream Product Team

May 8, 2026

5 min read

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The Instructor Experience

Making Video Quiz Creation More Self-Service

We wanted to make the basic steps for creating a video quiz self-explanatory. That way, instructional design teams could spend less time onboarding instructors and more time helping them create engaging video assessments. And because we know how stretched for time instructors often are, we focused on eliminating unnecessary complexity. In short, we wanted to make creating a video quiz straightforward, streamlined, and (dare we say) fun.

Enabling Precise Question Placement with Drag-and-Drop

Many of the instructional designers and instructors we spoke with mentioned that in other in-video quizzing tools they had tried, adding questions to the video timeline was not as easy as they would like. Getting a question to appear at the right moment in the video was important but the steps required to do so could be time-consuming.

To make adding questions as frictionless as possible, we made each question’s cue point in the media timeline draggable when the question is being created or edited. One benefit of this approach is that instructors and instructional designers do not have to manually enter a question’s timecode and then check whether the question appears at the desired frame; instead, they can simply drag and drop the question’s cue point to the desired position in the timeline.

Instructor view of the media player with the grab cursor hovering over the draggable cue point for the second question and the timeline progress bar at the second question’s timecode. The "Add Question" button is disabled.

Catering to a Wide Variety of Instructor Use Cases

When we asked instructors how they envisioned using video quizzing in their courses, their answers varied widely. Many wanted to enhance learning by giving students more opportunities to retrieve and apply course material. Others wanted to incorporate low-stakes video assessments into their courses to identify students who might need additional support in achieving the intended learning outcomes. Still others wanted to use video quizzing for summative assessments that students would take at the end of a unit or module.

Often, an optimal quiz behavior for one case would be suboptimal for another use case. For example, to reinforce learning, instructors who were interested in assigning video quizzes as a form of retrieval practice typically wanted students to receive feedback immediately after submitting an answer. However, instructors who were interested in using video quizzes for summative assessments often wanted the option to release feedback after a student submitted the quiz or at a later date.

A key takeaway from this input was that video quiz creation needed to be highly flexible to support these wide-ranging use cases without sacrificing the simplicity of the user experience. Quiz configuration needed to be discoverable, clear, and intuitive. To make quiz settings easy to find, we included a dedicated “Settings” tab in the side panel. We added a short description beneath each setting label. This helps make each setting’s purpose and behavior more explicit. One-click toggle switches and simple dropdown menus help keep quiz configuration straightforward.

Settings tab in the video quiz side panel showing “Allow skipping toggled off” and “Allow changes to answers toggled on”, with additional settings fading out below.

Tying Video Quizzing Into LMS Assignments and Gradebooks with LTI®

From the get-go, we factored learning management system (LMS) integration into the product design. We knew the workflow for adding video quizzes to course assignments needed to be easy and that automatically syncing quiz scores to gradebooks would save instructors time.

LTI (including LTI Deep Linking 2.0 for adding quizzes to assignments and LTI Assignment and Grade Services 2.0 for syncing scores to gradebooks) provided a strong standards-based foundation for building out these workflows across multiple LMS platforms.

LTI® is a trademark of the 1EdTech® Consortium, Inc. (1edtech.org)

The Student Experience

Optimizing for Simplicity

For students, we sought to design the digital equivalent of an ideal physical location for a quiz: a welcoming and supportive environment free from distractions.

To that end, we considered whether any user interface element in the student view would draw students’ attention away from the video player and quiz questions, the two most important elements on the page. If it did, we removed it. To optimize the student experience for simplicity, much of the design process centered on identifying what was non-essential.

To help students get off to a smooth start, we placed key quiz details — including the description, number of allowed attempts, and whether students could change their answers — above the “Start Quiz” button. This gives students a clear sense of what to expect before they begin.

The “Quiz Details” section on the screen for starting a quiz, with the “Start Quiz” button beneath the quiz name and details.

Emphasizing the Connection Between the Quiz’s Video and Its Questions

One of the biggest decisions about the student experience was where quiz questions should appear. Using a modal window to display the questions would break the connection between the video and the question, two elements we wanted to feel interconnected, so this option was out. Overlaying the question on the player window would block the paused video frame, important context that we wanted to preserve for students.

We also considered having students answer questions from the “Questions” tab in the side panel. However, we felt this content area should be reserved for showing students a record of the questions they had answered. Using this area for both answering questions and reviewing previously answered questions would make it less effective as a place for students to track their progress.

We ultimately arrived at placing questions beneath the player window, in the same space where the quiz description appears when no question is being displayed. This location has the advantage of allowing students to keep the paused video frame in view while answering questions.

Student view of the media player at a cue point for a question. The question appears beneath the player. An answer is selected and the “Clear Answer” and “Save” buttons beneath the answers are enabled.

See ShareStream’s Video Quizzing In Action

We wanted to make it straightforward for instructors to turn course videos into quizzes tailored to their instructional goals, from retrieval practice and formative check-ins to summative assessments. For students, we wanted to create a guided, intuitive quizzing experience that reinforces the connection between the quiz’s video content and its questions.

To go deeper on this update and explore how ShareStream can support your video quizzing use cases:

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All other names used on this site are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Privacy

Terms

ShareStream.com

All other names used on this site are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Privacy

Terms

ShareStream.com