Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Embedding YouTube “Clips”

Posted by Rondi Schei

Hello All!

I am going to piggy back on Greg’s Kaminski’s post on Video resources and customizing the start/end time. Being able to choose start and end times for YouTube videos is extremely useful. I personally found this out when converting my EC 201 course to OER materials.

It starts with an idea

Back in 2013 when I recorded the lectures for my EC 201 course, I did them straight through. They ranged from 25 minutes to and hour.  While I did provide an active note-taking component for students, they were still long.

Last summer, I decided to switch things up and go with an OER textbook.  I found one that mirrored the publisher text I used fairly closely. Well, as close as was possible. I felt really fortunate!  Then I got an idea…

How do people engage in written content these days. I started thinking of all the articles I read from various news sites, Facebook, etc.  There was a common thread. The written text was not only broken up with images, but video as well.

So, I thought…why don’t  I do that too? It’s worth a shot, right?

What that entailed was converting the OER textbook sections into HTML pages in Brightspace. This process is a blog for another day!  Since this blog is about embedding video clips, let’s get to it!

Inserting video clips

To embed a “clip” from a video on YouTube, you need to use the following embed code template:

<iframe src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/video id #?start=000&amp;end=000&amp;” allowfullscreen=”” width=”560″ height=”315″ frameborder=”0″>

In bold, I have highlighted the key elements that you need to change with your own information:

• video id #: this is the unique id that YouTube gives each video. You can find it the address bar.   So, if your video id # is Gvh8w8UDIjI  (i.e., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvh8w8UDIjI), replace the phrase video id # with Gvh8w8UDIjI
• Start=000: This the start time in seconds. For instance, if you want the video to start at 3 minutes 23 seconds,  that would be [(60 × 3) + 23] = 203 seconds for a Start=203.  If you want it to start at the beginning, just type start=0.
• End=000: This also must be in seconds. If you want the video to play through the end, you can remove the section “end=000&amp;” entirely.

Let’s take my very first lecture video.  I want to pull out just the portion on budget lines. The final product (embed code) might look something like this:

<iframe src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/Gvh8w8UDIjI?start=362&amp;end=762&amp;” allowfullscreen=”” width=”560″ height=”315″ frameborder=”0″>

In the HTML page that you want to add the video clip:

1. Click on Insert Stuff from the tool bar
2. Select Embed Code
3. Paste your embed code into the box
4. Click Next
5. Click Insert

Voila!

The finished product looks like any other embedded YouTube video, but when you click play, the video starts and ends where you have chosen!