There are two ways that a course can play a video:

From Vimeo

A video playing from Vimeo looks like this:

The player controls will allow you to:

• Play/pause the video
• Adjust the video quality
• Play/exit full screen mode

The Vimeo video will be called into the course player directly from Vimeo.

If you are accessing a course that has been created by your own team (so it’s not a generic Upskill People course) then they will have their own Vimeo Pro account. Before you contact Upskill People Support, check with your internal course development team first because the issue might have been caused by the video being deleted from Vimeo; or it could be that the Vimeo subscription has not been renewed. This is especially true on occasions “where is was working okay previously!”

From a ‘fallback’ video

Sometimes, your corporate firewall won’t allow Vimeo videos to play, which is why the video fallback is in place. It’s like a backup option. If a video is being played using a fallback, then it will look like this instead:

The player controls will allow you to:

• Play/pause the video
• Adjust the audio volume
• Play/exit full screen mode

You can see that the video controls look very different for both ways, so this is how you can tell what type of video playback you can see. It’s important to be able to distinguish between the two ways a video is played, because it will tell you where to go to next for help and support.

If your Vimeo video doesn’t play, then that might be okay (as your corporate firewall will block it anyway). However, if your fallback video also isn’t working, then you need to tell whoever created the course ASAP!

What do I do next?

Your first port of call will be your L&D team, and you should tell them that the Vimeo video or the video fallback isn’t working.

You might find that your teams are able to skip through a video when learning on a mobile device, and you might want to force them to watch the whole of the video because you’re going to ask them some questions about it in a short quiz!

There is no easy solution to this challenge at the moment. We chose Vimeo as our preferred hosting platform for video content because of its ability to stream video content suitable for the bandwidth available as well as it being a very cost-effective solution for our customers to manage their own Vimeo accounts. When we play a video in our course player we are actually using Vimeo’s own player controls within our courses.

When viewed on a mobile device these Vimeo controls play video content through the devices built-in video player and therefore do not prevent anyone from skipping through the video and we have no control over how that happens.

You might find this next guide useful: Build a video page in ECB