Instructions for setting up the database in WebCT:

1)      Click on the Add Page or Tool link in the Control Panel

2)      Under Course Content Tools, select Image Database

3)      Enter “Interactive Videos” as your title and make it visible on the navigation bar

4)      Click on that new link within your navigation bar and go to Designer Options

5)      Provide a name for the first database – since you will want all your videos in the same database, you might give it the same name as the course

6)      Once you have created a database, click on its link and key in place markers with keywords specific to each video.

7)      You’ll have to upload the videos separately into your institution’s webspace as WebCT’s database feature cannot open them as zipped files stored within WebCT

8)      Once you’ve uploaded the videos to your own webspace, you’ll be able to place the web address in the individual description fields.  That will create hyperlinks that people can click onto when they search your database.

Instructions for setting up the database on your own website:

1)   There are many kinds of tools for this that are downloadable from the Internet.  Google, for instance, not only is a search engine, but offers free search engines for users' personal websites.

2)  Xtreeme offers a free search engine download

Try either of those, or Google another one.  Students will be able to then click on the link in the navigation bar and type in a search for any of the videos they need. 

Now, the presence of a search engine means that you've got a lot of pages for your viewers to search.  A lot of videos, however, take a lot of space.  A solution to a lack of personal or institutional hosting space for uploading these videos (the more you have, the more valuable the database will be) is to create interactive audio files instead of interactive video files.  Unless you have something specific to demonstrate for which you need the video, the talking head feature is of less value than the voice that will be interpreting the slideshow.  An interactive audio presentation takes only a hundred kilobytes, so you could get ten of them to a megabyte, or between twenty and thirty of them in the same space it takes to post an interactive video.  Conclusion