Create an ensemble of your campus videos!
September 26, 2016
Create an ensemble of your campus videos!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Ensemble Video
Our Ensemble instance is used quite a bit by our campus. Its primary use is for hosting the videos instructors would show in face-to-face courses for their online courses. Faculty who legally own VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, or some other digital format of a video may drop that video to our office (after obtaining permission by copyright holders to show their videos to online courses). Student workers perform the tasks necessary to take that original video and have it hosted on our Ensemble video license. The faculty member is provided a URL to the Ensemble video (which is added to a playlist for the faculty member) to link within the LMS.
We also heavily use Ensemble for ADA compliance. This includes hosting transcribed videos (for which a third-party service is integrated with our Ensemble instance), Kurzweil files, specially annotated PDF documents, etc., to provide a central location for our campus to better serve those students with special needs.
We also heavily use Ensemble for ADA compliance. This includes hosting transcribed videos (for which a third-party service is integrated with our Ensemble instance), Kurzweil files, specially annotated PDF documents, etc., to provide a central location for our campus to better serve those students with special needs.
- Faculty bring in a variety of different formats for videos, including VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, MP4, and more. Those at Ensemble Video have helped us to develop a good streamlined workflow to get these varying formats hosted in a central location and develop a campus-wide standard.
- Ensemble Video has greatly helped us provide better services to our students needing special accommodations.
- Ensemble is a stable product, where needing help from their support team is very rare. However, on those very rare occasions, their support team is very knowledgeable. We had an issue once that I thought was so obscure, but the team quickly replied with the right answer to resolve our issue, without so much as a clarification on my support ticket.
- If self hosting the Ensemble Video product, their team will take care of upgrades for you as part of the licensing.
- There is one issue where sometimes the 'Add' button to add new media disappears, typically once per week. The workaround is to restart the physical server. While restarting the server each week can be a good thing, it would be nice not to have to keep a reminder on my calendar.
- I would say our campus' overall business objective would be to serve our students. Ensemble Video has helped us to do that, and in particular has helped to better serve students with special needs.
Our campus has been using Ensemble Video since 2008. At the time we were unaware of Panopto or Kaltura, or other services. That said, I'm glad we picked Ensemble Video. Their team has been very supportive of us every step of the way. I'm not saying the other services would not be effective for our campus, but from what I've seen of those other services Ensemble best suits our needs and workflows.