Bloomsbury Learning Environment strengthens college collaboration with the MediaCore video learning platform
The Bloomsbury Learning Environment (BLE) in London has strengthened collaboration between its five colleges with a shared digital media repository using the MediaCore video learning platform.
The BLE is an e-learning service used by five collegiate members of the University of London known collectively as the Bloomsbury Colleges: Birkbeck; the Institute of Education (IOE); the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine; the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS); and the Royal Veterinary College (RVC).
The BLE was set up in 2004 to allow these colleges to share expertise, knowledge and skills and make cost savings. Sarah Sherman, BLE Service Manager, explains how she has streamlined the colleges’ use of technology.
Digital media repository
“In 2010 we were awarded funding from Jisc, the charity championing the use of digital technologies in UK education, to create digital media and explore how best to manage, distribute and control access to educational audio and video content and PDF files. As a result of the project, we made the link with MediaCore,” Sarah explains.
After successfully testing the service the BLE decided to become fully hosted by MediaCore. Sarah said, “We found that a shared service is more manageable and scalable than doing it in-house. Also MediaCore is a great company to be working with, very enthusiastic and keen for the platform to improve and be driven by users.”
Shared resources
The BLE uses Moodle, the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), across the five colleges and shares licences for tools such as web conferencing and lecture capture.
The consortium uses the video platform (branded as the Bloomsbury Media Cloud) as a media repository to store and distribute large digital files. “We haven’t needed to vigorously market or push it as it has filled a gap within Bloomsbury to store media. I create new user accounts for staff to add media assets; it is very simple to use and users have control over who can access their assets.”
The colleges were previously recording videos and uploading them directly onto various streaming servers, which proved to be difficult to access. “Until now managing videos on the server was hard,” said Sarah. “For example, the video streaming servers do not have a user interface so we would have to go into the server and try to find the content manually. The media managers would also have to do regular audits of the content to find out what was stored and where. MediaCore provides a search facility and interface that we can use to manage, store and catalogue the content much more easily and comfortably.”
Store and catalogue media
Some of the colleges’ media and marketing teams are using the platform to promote eminent professors by storing the video, embedding the link on to their websites and distributing them to attract students.
Sarah said, “What has really driven the usage of the platform is word of mouth and how easy it is to use. The video library is growing all the time and our current usage is 217 GBs, or 1200 separate items including video and audio recordings.”
Integration with Moodle
Whereas Moodle has a limit on uploading files, the integration of the video platform means that there is no limit on file sizes for the BLE colleges as the files are being hosted with MediaCore.
“Moodle is the platform that our users are familiar with, but it is limited on the storage side,” Sarah explains. “We did not want to introduce another layer of additional passwords and usernames either. Now the video platform is integrated it means that staff can just upload the file within Moodle and the video platform stores it, doing all the work in the background.”
Restricted access
Sarah has also been able to work with MediaCore to request new features such as working on permission sets to view certain content.
“For example, the RVC might be delivering a seminar on bovine intestinal disease that includes gory videos of the operation,” she said. “We can now easily restrict this content to students on the relevant course so that others do not stumble across them. Another example is the IOE which might create teacher training videos which we do not want made publicly available. The MediaCore integration with Moodle enables this whole process to be a seamless experience for users.”
Catalogue and search
As well as solving the problem of storing media, the BLE members can also add existing videos stored in Vimeo or YouTube by adding the link into MediaCore. Sarah said, “We now have the potential to collate all our media in one place which means students and lecturers do not have to go elsewhere to search for it. We also have the option to add a metadata field or keyword when adding media which makes it is easy to catalogue and search for content.
“We also wanted a copyright licence option to be added as a drop-down menu so that the author can flag that they are happy for the video to be used or adapted or that it is copyright protected and cannot be altered. I sent this request to MediaCore and they have added the feature.”
Lecture capture
Most colleges in Bloomsbury use lecture capture software which synchronise with the institutional timetable, automatically records each lecture and stores them on Moodle for students to access afterwards.
Sarah said, “The academics do not need to do anything to record the lecture, they just have to teach their class as normal and the technology does the rest. The students access the video through Moodle afterwards and use it for revision purposes. It does not stop them going to the lectures as they generally use it to revisit sections that they did not understand or use it later for exam revision.”
Education on demand
The BLE is also planning to use the Bloomsbury Media Cloud to ensure better and wider access to learning and teaching professionals. For example, most courses at Birkbeck run from 6 to 9pm and there is an average student age of 35 with many either in full-time employment, retired or full-time parents.
Sarah said, “The availability of virtual materials means that students can access their learning wherever. It is how the world is changing - we can watch TV on demand in our everyday lives and education has to be like that too, especially for fee paying students with high expectations. If they could not get to the lecture theatre then they should still be able to experience what they are paying for. Having accessibility anytime anywhere means we are providing the best possible education delivery we can.
“Additionally, all colleges have distance learning provisions which is a growing part of our offering and having the facility to support those purely online courses is important. We still send DVDs and CDs to students across the world; however we are looking at how we can use MediaCore to do this in the future.”
Learning analytics
The BLE is also looking at how they can use MediaCore’s data to understand and improve teaching methods and the student experience.
Sarah said, “Learning analytics is a big thing in education now as it is important to look at the techniques that are proving successful and replicating this to other areas. For example we are planning to analyse how often videos are looked at to measure against retention. We can see that video plays from January to July 2013 have increased 750% from 866 plays in January to 7360 plays in July. This appears to be down to the increased popularity of the platform, more content being uploaded and students increasingly using the resource as a revision tool in the lead up to exams.”
Sarah concluded, “Overall the platform is very popular with my team and the college staff. For example, we had an email recently from one of the colleges’ marketing managers who wanted to make sure that senior managers were aware of the platform to ensure sustainability.”
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