Remote teaching

Course tools: Kaltura resources

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Kaltura is WashU’s approved video content management platform. While it may not be as straightforward as Zoom for recording Powerpoint lectures or seminar-style conversations, Kaltura is a far more powerful tool overall. Once you become comfortable with it, Kaltura promises to enrich your Canvas learning environment well beyond simple lecture capture.

Here are some useful features of Kaltura’s platform:

  1. Closed Captioning: All videos processed through Kaltura are automatically closed captioned.  Closed Captioning can be particularly helpful for your students who are either hard of hearing or who are non-native English speakers. 
  2. Multi-stream capture and playback: Kaltura can simultaneously capture two content streams and the Kaltura player lets viewers decide which stream to prioritize (unlike Zoom which creates a “flat” video picture-in-picture video with no viewer control of the streams).
  3. Transcripts: Related to Closed Captioning, Kaltura also provides full transcripts of all processed material. These transcripts are searchable for students, both within a specific video and across all videos in a course media gallery. 
  4. Keywords: While all Kaltura processed material attached to your course can be subjected to “full text searches,” you can also attach keywords to specific videos, thereby grouping your content thematically. 
  5. Video Editing: Though Kaltura’s editing features are not as powerful as some other software programs, they do allow to trim the start and end of your videos and split longer videos in order to effectively chunk content. 
  6. Student Engagement: Whether through the Annoto integration or through Kaltura Quizzes, you can overlay student engagement tools onto your videos.  You can also use the comments feature to conduct an discussion-board style activity with students.
  7. Student Note Taking: With Annoto integration, students can take personal notes for their own reviewing purposes on Kaltura processed videos. 
  8. Non-native Video Processing: You can process any .mp4 file (even those recorded in Zoom) or public YouTube video through the Kaltura system.
  9. Analytics: Kaltura captures viewer analytics–such as total views and overall time watched—so you can track student engagement with all Kaltura media content.
  10. Student Video Submissions: Your students can also use Kaltura to submit videos to the media gallery, discussion boards, or assignments.

Questions about Kaltura?  Contact Jason Crandall at jasoncrandall@wustl.edu.

Links to instructional videos and resources

Using Annoto comments, questions, and discussion in your videos

Annoto user guide

Need help with Annoto? Contact Annoto support: support@annoto.net

Using Video Quizzes in your Canvas course: