University of Edinburgh ups video grade with Kaltura


Details

Michelle Clancy

| 12 November 2015





The University of Edinburgh has chosen Kaltura for its media asset management service.


Edinburgh is piloting the centralised platform, which will go live University-wide for the 2016 academic year. All 35,000 students and 10,000 staff will be able to use Kaltura's tools to create, edit, share, view, re-use and centrally store audio and video content to enrich learning, communicate more effectively to external audiences and further enhance research activities.

With Kaltura's centralized platform, which includes online video and social media hooks, Edinburgh are making a step-change in its approach to media asset management, and this investment is seen as fundamental to achieving their strategy for digital education growth. Students and staff will benefit from the ability to easily create and publish video across multiple platforms including VLEs, the University website, YouTube, iTunesU and academic blogs.

The Kaltura video platform gives Edinburgh the ability to support new video-based activities, including:

• Video-based assignments: these can be recorded on any device by students, edited, and then submitted via the VLEs;
• Personalised video feedback from staff to students or allowing students to record and share video content with their peers/tutors, and use commenting tools to crowdsource feedback;
• A Web-based video portal with curated channels of content that showcase great work for sharing within the University community or externally;
• Strengthening the link between research and teaching by discovering content from research projects and editing these into clips for use in teaching and learning;
• Better accessibility and inclusion through the use of recording tools, transcripts, subtitles etc.;
• The creation of open educational resources, using built-in copyright and publishing workflows, that can be made freely available online;
• Flipped classrooms and streaming of lectures and presentations to remote locations;
• Student revision libraries that hold recorded lectures and other content that can be revisited by students at a time to suit them.

Kaltura's in-built analytics will give Edinburgh the ability to track the popularity of pieces of content, the level of engagement and its impact. This information can then be used to refine and adapt the video strategy to further boost interaction to improve learning outcomes.

"Our constant desire to enhance our students' experience made it clear we needed to re-think how we collect, manage and deliver our video and audio assets," said Anne-Marie Scott, head, digital learning applications and media, University of Edinburgh. "We realised that to deliver a 21st century educational experience, we needed to make it as easy to work with video and audio as it is to create more established forms of content."