NYU: Saving Time While Engaging Every Student In Active Learning

At a research university the size of New York University, video is everywhere — recorded lectures, guest talks, lab demonstrations, and flipped-classroom prep. The challenge our partners at NYU described to us was a familiar one: students were watching, but watching quietly. Faculty wanted every learner to stay active inside the video, and they wanted to do it without adding hours of grading and moderation to an already full week.

The Challenge: Passive Video At Scale

Large, diverse cohorts make it hard to know who is truly engaging. A completion percentage tells you a video was played; it does not tell you whether a student paused to think, wrestled with a concept, or quietly fell behind. Faculty also needed to document meaningful interaction across online and hybrid sections, and doing that by hand over dozens of videos simply does not scale.

What NYU Did With Annoto

NYU added Annoto as an in-video engagement layer on top of the videos instructors were already using, connected through the LMS with one-click LTI 1.3. There was no new platform to learn and nothing to re-record. From there, faculty turned ordinary viewing into structured active learning:

• In-video quizzes and reflection points that ask students to respond at the exact moment a concept appears, rather than long after the fact.
• In-context discussion anchored to specific timestamps, so questions and peer answers live right next to the content that prompted them.
• Engagement analytics that surface attention, comprehension, and completion patterns across the whole cohort at a glance.
• Grade sync back to the LMS gradebook, so participation and quiz results flow automatically without manual transcription.

For instructors building new assessments, Lumo — our AI copilot — helps auto-generate in-video quizzes and scaffold questions across Bloom's taxonomy, turning a blank page into a ready starting point in minutes.

The Outcome: More Engagement, Less Busywork

The shift NYU cared about was as much pedagogical as it was operational. Videos stopped being a monologue and became a place where students asked questions, answered one another, and left a visible trail of thinking. Because that activity is captured in context, faculty can see exactly where a cohort hesitates and adjust their teaching — instead of guessing.

Active learning and instructor time are usually a trade-off. The goal here was to remove that trade-off: keep every student participating while giving faculty their hours back.

Just as importantly, in-video interaction and automatic grade sync help document Regular & Substantive Interaction, easing a compliance burden that used to eat into teaching time. NYU joins the 200+ institutions using Annoto to make the video they already own more active, more measurable, and far less manual.