U Edinburgh Enhances Video in Teaching With New Platform
The University
of Edinburgh in Scotland has
chosen a new video platform that representatives say they believe will allow
faculty and
students to enhance learning, communicate more effectively and expand
research activities.
The
university is using Kaltura's Media Asset
Management System in a pilot program now and expects to make it
available
throughout the 35,000-student campus beginning with the 2016-17 school
year.
With
Kaltura's video platform, students and staff
will be able to create and distribute video across multiple platforms
including
VLEs, the university Web site, YouTube, iTunesU and academic blogs.
"We
realized 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," said
Anne-Marie
Scott, head of the University of Edinburgh's digital learning
applications and
media. "The ease with which we can create, edit and share content will
make it
possible for all of our staff and students to benefit from the power of
video."
Assignments
can be recorded, edited and submitted
by students on any device. Faculty members will then be able to give
students
video feedback on those assignments while students can share content
with their
peers and use commenting tools to crowdsource the feedback.
There
will also be a Web-based video portal where
content can be curated to showcase particularly high-quality video.
With more
video access to research being done at the university, teaching and
learning
could also be enhanced as more content can be displayed.
Additionally,
the features of the new platform
will allow:
- The
creation of open educational resources with
built-in copyright workflows;
- Flipped
classrooms and streaming of lectures and
presentations to remote locations; and
- Archived
lectures and other content that can be revisited
by students.
Additionally,
the video platform's built-in
analytic tools will help faculty and staff track the popularity of
content and
the level of student engagement.
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.