Video Management

Bb Learn Integration Simplifies Mediasite Video Work

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 07/30/19

Education technology company Sonic Foundry recently announced integration between its video platform and learning management system Blackboard Learn Ultra. The updates to Mediasite will make it easier, according to the companies, for faculty and students to create, share, watch and grade video lectures and assignments directly through their Blackboard courses.

Mediasite allows for recording, editing, publishing and management of lectures or videos. The "Ultra" experience is Blackboard's dramatically updated interface, which runs on a software-as-a-service version of the LMS.

With the new functionality, users can create videos and screencasts using a computer's webcam and microphone or upload videos into Mediasite. The presentations created in Mediasite will automatically be published directly to the corresponding Ultra course. When Mediasite is launched within Ultra, it will set up the resources to allow authorized faculty and enrolled students to browse the content. The integration can also be used with Blackboard's Original Experience.

One institution that tested the integration was James Cook University in Australia. "We began integrating Mediasite into Blackboard Learn Ultra with a pilot and quickly moved to a full implementation," said Toby Nutting, learning environments system administrator at the school, in a statement. "Now we can upload Mediasite videos directly into Ultra, where all of our faculty and students spend the most time."

Previously, Nutting noted, publishing a lecture required jumping "back and forth between several dashboards." Now, he said, "We just go straight into Ultra, click 'Mediasite Content Selection' and away we go."

The integration is free for all Mediasite users and works with both on-premise and cloud implementations.