Online Media Assignments - Advice for Staff

In your unit you may have an assessment component that requires students to develop a media presentation that they record using their own device and then submit on CloudDeakin for evaluation. This allows Cloud (Off campus) students to participate remotely and can allow for sharing and peer review among students online.

It may be in the form of a role play, group presentation or interview etc, requiring students to demonstrate specific skills associated with their profession and use their interpersonal and verbal communication skills to interact and respond instinctively to different scenarios.


However, it is not as simple as the student recording their presentation, then uploading it to an Assignment Folder on CloudDeakin for assessment. Students will tend to use devices with recording capabilities that are integrated into their everyday lives such as their iPhone, iPad or laptop and there is also a lot of free video-editing software they can use to jazz up their production. All these recording devices and software output different file-sizes and formats that may not be accessible to other students or teaching staff as they do not have the compatible software to view the file or the file size is not accepted by CloudDeakin as it is too large to upload to an Assignment Folder (maximum limit of 250mb).


Contact Health EDU to talk through the advice below and decide if the associated technologies and process will work for your assessment requirements.




  • Producing media can be a lot of work and should be appropriate with the assessment weighting as to what you expect the students to do and the time it will take them.

  • Although the guides for students are comprehensive, these tasks can be technically demanding... for example some students may need to convert or compress their media files so that they are in an acceptable format and file size to upload to DeakinAir. The best workaround for lack of technical competence is to encourage the students to start as early as possible!

  • Consider the length of the video. The longer the video the larger the file and the harder to upload online. We recommend a video of five minutes or less in a low resolution. If it is required to be longer than 5 minutes, consider segmenting your video into parts.

  • Set expectations on the quality of the video. Do you expect a professional masterpiece or a simple point and shoot? Do you expect students to edit their video post-production to include titles, music or animations?

  • Do the students need to upload their video to DeakinAir before submitting to the CloudDeakin Assignment Folder? If it is a 1 minute video, the file size will be small enough (under 250mb) to upload it directly to CloudDeakin, they just need to make sure it is in a compatible format like .mp4 format. However do consider your marking staff who may be marking at home and will need to download each and every video submission. Depending how many submissions there are, this could eat into their marking time and their data allowance.



Trial this process from start to finish and see how you feel following the steps and using the technology. You will get asked plenty of questions by your students so it is a good idea to feel confident and understand the process yourself


It is very difficult to determine a one-size-fits-all process that covers every scenario a student will encounter. However, we have developed the below comprehensive guides for students to take them through the three stages of online media submissions.

Note  You can copy the links to these guides and include them in your Content on your CloudDeakin Unit Site for students to access.


Important  At Stage 3, you will need to decide and advise your students seperately which method you would like them to use to submit the DeakinAir media in CloudDeakin. The options provided in the guide are to add a media link or embed the media into a web document in their Locker or Portfolio or post to a discussion topic. The other option that is not listed is to copy and paste the link into a Word/PDF doc. This method is the easiest for students but can make accessing the link a little harder for markers. Refer to the next step below 3. Access the DeakinAir media link for marking for further information.


We recommend that you post a News item and/or provide your own tailored assessment instructions in the Content to guide students through the requirements of your assessment. You can use these sample instructions as a basis for explaining your requirements, just copy and alter the text as needed.




If students have followed the instructions correctly for embedding/linking and submitting the DeakinAir video to CloudDeakin, then marking staff should be able to access the media relatively easily/quickly.

If students have not followed the recommended procedure or have provided a link in other ways, then an additonal step or two may be required by the markers to access/view the media. For example, if the link has been copied and pasted it into a Word document/PDF or placed in the Comments section of the assignment submission, you cannot simply click on the link to access the video.

To access the media to leave feedback follow the instructions below depending on the method of submission:


DeakinAir URL link copied and pasted into a Word document:

  1. Click on View as text in the bottom right-hand corner
  2. Highlight the Deakin URL link, right-click and Open Link in New Tab (or copy the link and paste it into a new tab).

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DeakinAir URL link copied and pasted into a PDF file:

  1. Click on the Download button in the bottom right-hand corner.
  2. Open the downloaded PDF and click on the Deakin URL link.

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DeakinAir URL link copied and pasted into the Comments field of a submission:

  1. Highlight the URL.
  2. Right-click and Open Link in New Tab (or copy the link and paste it into a new tab).

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