Cloud Computing | Feature
Lecture Capture Takes to the Cloud
Columbus State Community College has formed an alliance with Kaltura and TechSmith to create a turnkey lecture capture solution that can be deployed via the cloud.
Using TechSmith’s
Camtasia Relay system and Kaltura’s open source
video platform, Columbus State Community
College (OH) has developed a process to move captured Relay content
directly from on-campus classrooms to the Kaltura cloud. The goal is to ensure
high-quality streaming video for all CSCC students, regardless of where they
are.
The school's focus is hardly surprising. CSCC is a widely
dispersed institution, with two campuses and nine off-campus centers serving
more than 30,000 students. Of that number, nearly a quarter are enrolled in
distance-learning programs. Add in another 22,000 students in CSCC's Community
Education and Workforce Development program--many of whom participate in
training from their workplace--and you begin to see why the high-quality
delivery of online instruction is so critical.
To learn more about CSCC's cloud-based lecture capture
program, Campus Technology spoke with
Jason LaMar and Joel Nelson, multimedia web developers with the college's
Instructional Technologies and Distance Learning division and project
coordinators for the CSCC/TechSmith/Kaltura alliance.
Campus Technology: How did the project--and the
alliance--get started?
Joel Nelson: CSCC
was part of the initial beta for Camtasia Relay, so we've been working with
TechSmith from the beginning.
We have a lot of instructors at CSCC who want to record
their lecture in class and deliver it to the business learning courses or as
supplemental material in the traditional courses. Relay was an ideal product,
but it only recorded and produced the lecture capture. Our faculty needed
delivery methods as well, and they wanted a solution they could grow into. We
began to do research, we looked into a few different solutions, but we quickly
settled on Kaltura.
Kaltura had a willingness to configure a solution specific
to what we wanted to do: tie into Relay and use it with Blackboard. Pretty much
all of our courses offer supplemental material using Blackboard.
LaMar: We were
interested in finding a better outlet for storage and delivery of content--and
that interested Kaltura. I think both companies immediately saw how the
marriage of their products could benefit all of their clients.
CT: How does Kaltura help CSCC make the transition from a
locally based solution to the cloud?
Nelson: The lure of
Kaltura is the cloud element. You could use the product right out of the box to
put your media onto iTunesU
or YouTube. But in education there's
always a need to find a solution over which you have some sort of ownership.
Even if you're planning on making it freely available, you still want that
ownership. From YouTube, you can deliver to everybody, but you don't have
ownership; with iTunesU, you have ownership, but you can't deliver to
everybody.
Now the piece is inside your LMS--that's another step
Kaltura has taken. It's integrated so you can deploy right into the heart of a
course, so instructors feel that ownership as well.
CT: What kind of cloud system does Kaltura offer?
Nelson: The back end
of Kaltura is Akamai. When you put your
content on Kaltura, the video can be delivered quickly because it's coming from
the server closest to you or the one with the least traffic. It automatically
chooses the best option.