How to stream video clips to students in classroom and at home, using Moodle Kaltura
2012/05/02
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- DVDs are getting a bit long in the tooth, not to mention VHS, and can form a real obstacle or time-consuming distraction in an educational setting, from handling the media to finding compatible software and/or hardware players for the media.
- Fortunately, there is a now a better way to make video clips available to students than uploading them to YouTube.com:
- university-supported,
- more compliant with copyright and fair use restrictions (which still apply)
- also requiring only a web browser (available on all campus computers, including teacher computers in classrooms, including those that have no (region-free) DVD-player installed)
- and a course enrolment. But access to a Moodle course can now be considered a given, both for teachers and students.
- Moodle Kaltura allows for easy
- uploading of a video file by the teacher
- viewing by the student (streamed – Flash required, not different from YouTube.com).
- View a screencast example how easy it is with Moodle Kaltura to upload and playback a video clip from a movie DVD.
- Not different from YouTube.com, you still need to edit out the segment from the DVD that you want to show in your class, uploading a full DVD I do not intend to test.
- From this example, you can also get an idea how long the server-side encode takes before the video an be streamed back to students: the short clip of a few minutes here starts playing back at 12:40. Naturally, a teacher would prepare their course, including all video uploads, before the term starts or possibly before the week starts, or, in extremis, before the class starts – in practice, only the – extremely unlikely – scenario where the teacher would try and upload the video during the class is not supported.
