The NORDUnet Kaltura Service is based on the Kaltura On-Prem Edition with a redundant centralized installation hosted in NORDUnet Hosting Centers within the Nordic region. All organizations using the service will have each their own administrative instance which can be managed as a separate installation.

Kaltura

The Kaltura platform provides tools that facilitate innovative and engaging learning experiences beyond just lecture capture. Next generation learning is offered to students, staff and faculty via online video solutions covering both teaching, learning, student retention and increased engagement across campuses. Staff and students can easily create, upload, edit, manage, publish, discover and deliver high quality video to any device, live or on demand.

Flipped Classroom, Distance Learning, MOOCs and SPOCs are all new teaching and learning ways supported by the solution, and Kaltura  can be integrated with major Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as Canvas, Desire2learn, Sakai, Moodle and Blackboard.

Currently Kaltura is used by approx. 60 universities and research organizations throughout the Nordics, reaching almost 400,000 end users.

Availability

The NORDUnet Kaltura service is available to all organizations and projects within the Nordic NREN community, through the NREN in each country.

Case:

Roskilde University has moved all its video productions into the Kaltura video management system from DeiC. This is expected to lead to security, stability, and control of copyright issues.

DeiC delivers Kaltura as a service hosted by NORDUnet. The combination of DeiC and NORDUnet was a deciding factor when the Danish university chose Kaltura.

Consultant Michael Pedersen from the Academic IT function at Roskilde University explains:

“I recommended to the steering committee that we choose DeIC and NORDUnet. An important reason was that they belong in the world of academia. We are familiar with DeIC as the provider of our network connection, Adobe Connect, WAYF (Where Are You From), and other services.”

Kaltura is a video management system where Roskilde University may store videos and describe them using metadata. After an employee or student has placed a video in the system it may be accessed via a special video portal. Videos may also be embedded in web pages or integrated with the Moodle LMS (Learning Management System).

“Moodle integration is very important for us. It makes it easy for our educators to embed video in their courses,” said Michael Pedersen.

He is also glad that Kaltura is integrated with WAYF. That integration eases user administration because user accounts don’t have to be created separately for the system.

Long video clips

The previous video management solution at the university imposed limits on how long video clips users might store. The system was based on Adobe Flash technology, meaning that Apple users or users of smartphones and tablet computers were unable to view the videos.

“In order to get rid of the limitations of the old system, we experimented with YouTube. It works, but using YouTube means giving up some of our rights to the material. We don’t want to do that. Furthermore, a free cloud solution such as YouTube gives us no guarantee that our clips will continue to be available on the net,” said Michael Pedersen.

Kaltura solves both those problems. Roskilde University retains all rights to the videos. And with NORDUnet hosting the service, backup of data is taken care of.

“I hope that more universities will adopt the Kaltura solution. The more we are, the cheaper the system becomes for all of us. And we are in a stronger position when we suggest changes and new functionality in the system,” he said.

Roskilde University has been using video for education and communication for many years. In the archives, Michael Pedersen has found videos dating back to the 1970’s.

“Video could be used in many more places. For instance, many of our classes include laboratory work. Video provides an efficient way to demonstrate how to use the equipment,” he explained.