Melbourne University to introduce single video management platform

The University of Melbourne’s Project Evolve, the team overhauling the uni’s learning management system (LMS), will now be overseeing the deployment of a new unified video management system (VMS) to complement their work.

As learning materials increasingly become digitised, video has taken on a larger role in the university experience, with Melbourne Uni now generating and consuming hundreds of gigabytes and thousands of individual videos.

These videos are currently housed in different accounts hosted on a variety of platforms, which often means staff need to resort to spreadsheets to keep track of how and where they can access the right videos.

As part of the shift from Blackboard’s LMS to Canvas, the university’s Learning Environments and Infrastructure Services team is taking the opportunity to consolidate video services onto Kaltura’s cloud-based platform.

The Learning Environments team said the new VMS will “support the creation, distribution and management of rich media for all teaching and learning activities at the University of Melbourne”.

“It will also provide an extensive range of tools for making better use of video for research, promotion and engagement activity.”

One of those engagement activities will be in-video quizzing, where teaching staff can add pause points to their video coupled with questions for reflection and multiple choice quizzes - the results of which can be stored in an LMS gradebook.

Having all videos on one system will also generate more meaningful and consistent analytics, with Kaltura producing data on viewership, watch-through rates and engagement heat maps.

This will allow faculties and schools to tailor their video offerings over time to produce materials that best support the student learning experience.

Accessibility is another area that will benefit, with the new VMS including automatic transcriptions and captions. However, the university warns that video-posters should still “expect to invest some time in proofreading”.

Kaltura, a US-based company, has also worked with the University of Queensland in Australia, along with several US media organisations including HBO, Warner Brothers, and Thomson Reuters.

As for YouTube and Vimeo, the university is still encouraging staff to use public-facing platforms where appropriate to maintain the visibility of staff and student work to colleagues at other institutions and the general public.

However, the new VMS also touts a ‘YoutTube-like’ video publishing platform for internal materials.

Lecture capture and recording management, meanwhile, will continue to be performed by Echo360.