Learning Management Systems | News

Kaltura Releases Blackboard Building Block To Add Video

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 07/13/10

Kaltura, a company that develops open source products for creating and managing video on Web sites, has published a Blackboard Building Block that allows users to integrate video into their Blackboard Learn environments.

The new tool allows both faculty and students to post videos into their learning management system, edit them, and add metadata Users can add video to a course, submit a video assignment, view lecture videos, see a playlist of campus events, or access video from the library. The company said video files of any type can be transcoded for regular or high definition delivery on the Web or mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPad. Rich-media content is organized, secured, and accessed according to the roles and permissions that are defined within the Blackboard system.

The functionality is available as a self-hosted offering, in which videos sit within the existing infrastructure; or the program can be delivered in software-as-a-service form for external hosting of videos. Kaltura said that although the building block is available now, the source code will be released shortly for customization by institutions using it.

"With the release of our Blackboard Building Block, we can seamlessly provide all of our functionalities to the great many Blackboard users without requiring any integration effort," said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura chairman and CEO. "This is tremendously valuable and highly disruptive. It not only provides institutions with new rich-media capabilities, but also caters directly to today's YouTube generation of students, allowing them to fully contribute and interact with rich-media from within the Blackboard environment."