Teaching since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many instructors into the virtual world and out of the physical classroom. With these Zoom videos piling up, instructors are looking for options to store, edit and embed these videos into courses. Many instructors have found their solution with the Kaltura Video Platform.
Streamlining the ingestion process…
In order to make moving your Zoom Videos to Kaltura as smooth as possible, we’ve done some work behind the scenes by integrating Zoom and Kaltura for you. All Zoom Cloud recordings automatically transfer to Kaltura thanks this integration. This means the simplest way to ensure your videos get to Kaltura is to ensure all Zoom meetings are set to “Automatically recording meeting” with the “In the cloud” option, as pictured below.
Users can still upload any other Zoom videos to Kaltura if they have previous meetings recorded locally but they’ll need to manually upload those meetings. You can do so in the My Media area of your account on the MediaSpace website or within your Brightspace course.
Remember setting the meeting to automatically record to the cloud means not having to deal with this step nor will you accidentally forget to record sessions. Videos will show up in Kaltura shortly after Zoom finishes processing on their end.
** PRIVACY NOTICE: One situation that can happen with this setup is that a student stays at the end of the Zoom session and a private conversation is recorded and automatically posted. Please be careful to 1. Shut off the recording before your chat or 2. Use Kaltura editing options to crop that private discussion out of the video.
Editing Video Details
Zoom videos will all show up in your Kaltura My Media area. The title of the video will be the name of the meeting and the recording date will be included in the description.
You’ll likely want to rename the recordings from Zoom. All the Zoom recordings will show up with the name of the meeting that generated them and this can be especially confusing if you’re running a recurring meeting. The only way to tell these apart will be the time stamp of the meeting if you don’t change the names of the videos. I would recommend adding the recording date to the title for recurring recordings although it will always be included by default in the description.
In order to make changes to the title, description, and tags of the video, users will need to click on the pencil icon next to the video you want to change.
Then under the video, you will find a tab named Details. Here you can change the video name, add details, and update tags.
Some tags are automatically generated when the video is uploaded. But you can change these to anything you would like. Since Kaltura uses tagging instead of a folder system, we recommend you add any tags that will help you sort and search for this video such as year, course name, recording type, etc.
Sharing with students or other users
Now that you’ve seen how to get organized in Kaltura, the next step is sharing those videos out to others. We’ll present two major scenarios below that should cover most use cases and give most users an easy way to painlessly share video with their students, colleagues or anyone else.
Scenario One: Brightspace Instructor Share within Courses
Brightspace plus Kaltura makes it super easy to distribute videos to your students. At Meredith we have an integration set up between these two products that gives you the ability to embed these recordings directly into any content area in your course. There are three main strategies you can employ depending upon how you want to manage your content.
Add Existing Activity
The first strategy will be familiar to anyone who has used our previous video hosting system which is using the Existing Activities button in the Content area. Just choose Add Kaltura Media to choose which video to add as a link in the Content area.
Now you will have a popup box to choose which video to embed. Click the + button (1 on the screenshot) to create a new video or use the search bar (2) to filter your content. When you have found the video you want to add, click the Embed button (3) to add it to your Content area.
Using the Insert Stuff button
The Insert Stuff button is a little different because it allows you to directly embed a video (not just a link) anywhere where you have a text editor such as Module or Topic descriptions, Announcements, or Discussions.
After you click the Insert Stuff button, choose Add Kaltura Media. You will then be given the same popup box showing in the above section about when you add existing content. From there you can add, search, and embed videos.
A video embedded into the description of a topic could help break up text on the Content page like the screenshot below.
Course Media Gallery
Every course has a Media Gallery that is specific to that course and term. You can add your media here in addition to or instead of embedding other places on Brightspace.
You can add media to the gallery by going to the Media tab and clicking the Add Media button. We recommend this if you just have a few videos since it is not organized.
You can also add videos to your media gallery in playlists to help organize your content. An example is shown below.
To add a playlist to your media gallery, click the hamburger icon in the top right corner then choose Create channel playlist from the drop down menu. You will be asked to give your playlist a title, description, and tags then you can choose media to add.
Kaltura has a lot to choose from in Brightspace! If this seems overwhelming, we recommend you just choose 1 of these embed methods and you can try other methods later. It is more important to have videos available in a consistent location then to use every method available.
Scenario Two: Sharing Publicly
Kaltura videos can be shared or embedded for anyone to see. To do this, you need to login to the standalone Kaltura website for Meredith called MediaSpace.
To login, click Guest in the upper right corner then choose Login from the drop down menu. You’ll then see a screen to pick your login option of Faculty/Staff or Student. You will now be automatically logged in and taken back to the MediaSpace site.
Change video permissions
If your video is set to Private, anyone you share the link with will not be able to see the video. It has to be Unlisted or Published.
Watch this video for quick instructions on how to change the video permissions and grab the sharing link.
Grab the share or embed link
To copy the share or embed link, click on any video to view the media. Underneath the video, the Share tab contains your sharing options.
You can grab the share link to the media page and even specify start and end times. For the embed code, you can also select start/end times and player size.
Wrapping up
Zoom and Kaltura are a great way to record, store and share your videos with students and others. Zoom cloud recording is easy and just needs to be enabled on your Zoom invite for those absent minded among us, or you can record meetings on the fly if something important you need to document comes up.
Pairing that with Kaltura means those videos will remain available until you decide to delete them. Further you have a host of options when it comes to sharing, and if you ever need a copy for any purpose the videos are available for download to your local computer.