For your online course you may want to have a video available for your students to greet them to the online course. Or maybe you want to provide a module overview video to guide your students for the week. You may even want to post a recording of a lecture you made in a webinar with Zoom. For whatever purpose you want to use video for in your course; they need to live somewhere that they can be accessed by students. They need a video streaming host. YouTube is the best example of one of these video hosts. Anyone can upload a video and share links to it anywhere on the web.
What is Kaltura?
Kaltura is a video hosting and streaming service just like Youtube. It has a simple way to upload videos that can be watched and shared. It has a recording tool that works in the browser to make short videos. You can even make playlists that can be seen and shared by people.
What is Mediaspace?
Like Youtube, Kaltura has many products and tools in it’s family that help with you to create and host videos for your online course site. Mediaspace is, in short, a University of Minnesota specific host for Kaltura videos. The Kaltura integration with Canvas is pulling videos from the Kaltura Mediaspace hosting portal. As such, when talking about Kaltura and Kaltura Mediaspace, they are the same in practice.
Why use Kaltura over Youtube?
- Google’s recent policies on security changes bring into question the stability of Youtube as host
- Kaltura Mediaspace is hosted for University of Minnesota staff, faculty and students for free. It is tied to your personal account.
- Since Kaltura is hosted for University of Minnesota users: central IT can better assist with Kaltura problems. Youtube does not have the same quality and level of support through Google as with UMN central IT.
- The University of Minnesota’s learning management system, Canvas, has an integration with Mediaspace to quickly embed videos into content.
- Kaltura’s auto captioning feature is a bit more accurate than Youtube’s
How do I use Kaltura in Canvas?
Getting Media into Kaltura
To upload and create videos in Kaltura Mediaspace we have the following tutorials you can review:
Settings for Success
You may think after uploading your video that you may be done, but there are a few other important considerations with your Kaltura videos:
- How to set the video publishing settings from "Private" to "Unlisted" so students can view the video. Not changing this setting could mean your students cannot view the video. (This can be set during the upload process)
- How to ensure your videos are presented in your Canvas course in an accessible and usable manner.
- How to give ATD Collaborator access so we can step in to fix settings.
- How to tag videos to help with organization and make searching for them easier.
Adding Your Video in Canvas
When you have made your videos, you will finally want to add them to your Canvas. You can:
- obtain a link to the Kaltura video and add the link to your course
- create a playlist in Kaltura and add a link to it in the course (Coming Soon!)
- embed the video in the context your course materials
If you have any questions about this content or need further advice on video production for your course, out to CCAPS-ATD through the Learning Management Assistance form. (UMN login required)
