Yale Consolidates 10,000 Hours of Video Content

Yale University is moving its legacy video content onto a single software-based video platform produced by Panopto.

Over the years, like many other higher education institutions, Yale has incorporated video into its classrooms via lecture capture, flipped classroom and other methods. However, each department had typically taken responsibility for its own video needs.

In 2014, a university-wide committee determined that method was inefficient and set out to find an alternative that would streamline the process and address the needs of all faculty, staff and students. After a two-year process, Yale decided to transition its legacy video platforms, Kaltura and Echo360, to a single Panopto platform.

The company's technology includes a video content management system for uploading, managing and sharing video and audio files. It has a centralized, secure place for recorded lectures, flipped classroom videos and video of campus events. It comes with built-in video analytics, a web-based video editor, automatic encoding to ensure videos play efficiently on any device, and a search engine that allows students to review material mentioned or shown in their course videos. It will also integrate with the university's learning management system.

More than 10,000 hours of existing video generated by all the departments at Yale will be converted to the new platform. The new system will be ready when Yale students return to campus for the fall semester.

"Video has become a fundamental part of how our students learn on campus and online," said John Harford, manager of collaboration technologies for the Yale University Center for Teaching and Learning. "As we scale the use of video across campus, it's imperative that we have an integrated system for video management and lecture capture."

About the Author

Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.

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