25 Kaltura MediaSpace with Josh Harder — 10.27.2015

In the Active Teaching Lab on October 27, 2015, Josh Harder from DoIT Academic Technology shared tips and best practices in using Kaltura MediaSpace to create and host online videos. Kaltura MediaSpace is a UW supported platform similar to YouTube in that it provides you a place to upload, create, organize and share media such as video, audio, and images.

Key Takeaways

• You can share your media with others as editors; before you can add them, however, they need to have already logged into mediaspace.wisc.edu at least once so that their username shows up (this may mean that it takes two class periods, or an in-class tutorial, to introduce a video project).
• Other tools that can be used for similar purposes include: Office Mix (Windows), OBS (Open Broadcaster Software), Screencast-o-matic, Quicktime (Mac).
• The Timeline Feature in Kaltura is worth exploring; it allows you have both slides or images and video as a user-adjustable picture-in-picture window.
• Use the “Shared repository” to have students do a video scavenger hunt with smartphones and post directly to the shared repository, where they can discuss each other’s submissions.
• Greenshot screenshot software is an alternative software recommended by one of the participants for use with Windows computers.

If you’re interested in learning more to get up and running with Kaltura MediaSpace, watch the videos below and try stepping through the Kaltura worksheet we created for the session!

The Active Teaching Lab, a Faculty Engagement program, provides a safe space for structured explorations of cool teaching tools and techniques that your colleagues are using to engage students and teach more effectively. During the academic year, labs are held weekly and will be listed on the Active Teaching Lab page.

Josh’s Kaltura MediaSpace Story

Presentation Overview

1. MediaSpace Usage at UW-Madison
2. Quick Overview of MediaSpace functionality
   1. Upload and Create Media
   2. Edit Media
   3. Organize Media
   4. Share Media
3. Demonstrate Real Instructional Use
4. Hands-On and Q&A

Upload and Create Media: Currently, Kaltura MediaSpace allows you to upload media files (audio, video, images), create webcam recordings, embed YouTube videos, and create screen recordings.

Organize Media

Currently, media can be organized in Channels and Playlists. Kaltura channels are very similar to YouTube channels. They are essentially aggregated buckets of media. As an owner of a channel, you do not have control over the order media files are viewed. If you want to have more control over the order media is played, you should use a playlist. Playlists can also be embedded whereas channels cannot.

Share Media and Channels

Kaltura MediaSpace allows you to share editing and publishing of individual media items via the Collaboration feature. This feature allows you to add anyone else who has logged into https://mediaspace.wisc.edu with the ability to edit and/or publish media.

Kaltura MediaSpace also allows you to collaborate within Channels. What this means is you can have a centralized channel in which many people add media and remove media.

Instructional Uses: Here are a few ways you can use Kaltura MediaSpace in your instruction:

• Host your online lectures (most common).
• Have your students do a video scavenger hunt in which they record video and post it to a collaborative channel.
• Have your students to a digital media assignment instead of a traditional paper.
• Post pieces of relevant videos to your course (documentaries, snippets from popular media, etc.).
• What else can you think of?

Timeline (Advanced): The timeline feature lets you add bookmarks to your videos. These bookmarks can have text or images associated with them. This essentially turns the timeline feature into another way to do narrated PowerPoints (but you can use any image, not just PowerPoint Slides).