Kaltura has announced that the University of Northampton is rolling out Kaltura MediaSpace, integrated with Kaltura’s Video Building Block for Blackboard, to over 13,000 staff and students as it enhances its approach to blended teaching and learning.
Online video helps make more of face to face teaching and also helps students with different learning styles. It is a cornerstone of Northampton’s vision as it prepares to move to a £330 million state of the art campus at Waterside in September 2018. Instead of building large lecture theatres, the university will focus on face-to-face seminars supported by online learning. This approach also boosts the university’s support for overseas and distance-learning students.
With the Kaltura MediaSpace social video portal, Northampton staff and students are able to securely create, share, search and watch live and on-demand videos on any device. Users are already starting to take advantage of MediaSpace’s features including easy installation, personal video capture, live event broadcasting and the use of video for assessment. Northampton is also planning to promote the use of in-video quizzes and make content more easily available through the updated Kaltura Go mobile app.
Northampton chose Kaltura for its scalability, robustness and ease of use, ensuring it could be adopted quickly by staff and students, and support the University’s ambitious growth plans. Also key to the decision was its integration with the University’s Blackboard learning management system.
“MediaSpace has the potential to transform learning at Northampton. It will enable us to build our campus community and accelerate learning by making it easy to create, collaborate and share video content, enable creative assignments and support social learning,” said Rob Howe, head of learning technology, University of Northampton. “MediaSpace is an easy to use learning tool, which is proving to be an engaging and effective way for students to retain information and produce content for assessment, and for lecturers to stimulate student discussion.”
He added: “Our ambition is for Kaltura MediaSpace to become an embedded part of our new Teaching and Learning strategy, which puts blended learning and distance learning at the heart of the student experience.”
Northampton started using Kaltura three years ago to support the online submission of video for assessment. What started in the Faculty of Arts Science and Technology, has now spread across the University’s UK and overseas students, and now enables thousands of students to both create and upload video content for learning and assessment.
“The University of Northampton has long been at the forefront of education technology. It was one of the first UK universities to launch an app for students and staff when it went live with iNorthampton five years ago,” said Ron Yekutiel, chairman and CEO at Kaltura. “We are thrilled to continue and push together the envelope of digital transformation of teaching and learning through video.”
