First 4 years with Kaltura at a major university.
April 16, 2014

First 4 years with Kaltura at a major university.

Kirk Laird | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Falcon

Modules Used

  • Blackboard Building Block, Drupal Module

Overall Satisfaction

The university was struggling with video content in the current LMS and began a search for a better alternative. At the time Kaltura was the only system of the ones that were available that supported HTML5 and that was the original reason for choosing Kaltura over the other systems. We currently use a full on-prem install of the Falcon KMC and the most recent Blackboard building block. Our LMS is also fully on-prem. We have also created a Drupal site where one of the colleges can create proffesional developement content and make it available for purchase using Kaltura to ingest and stream the video content. We use virtual servers for all of the applications except for transcoding, we use a physical box for transcoding. We have found that transcoding on a physical machine is much more efficient that virtually. The use of Kaltura as our main video ingestion, transcoding and streaming system in our LMS has been very successful. Our player is branded and different groups have other needs, like making content downloadable or captioning, that Kaltura easily makes available to adjust in the KMC. We do not have the ability to screen record yet and only recently been able to take advantage of recording directly to a webcam by all users including students. This has been extremely effectively used in discussion boards and with distance learning courses.
  • Webcam recording directly into a discussion board or as an assignment is a great way to increase student engagement. There are other systems that do this now but we use Kaltura and it works great.
  • The KMC is very user friendly and makes it very simple to manage the content and system settings.
  • The "Studio" tab enables admins to customize the player with a long list of features. We have branded our player, changed colors, added different buttons.
  • The Kaltura metrics is fantastic. Seeing user engagement of specific users or videos is a huge plus. Instructors can even see metrics from their Blackboard course about the students in that course.
  • It would be nice to be able to adjust the player features for specific courses in an LMS.
  • I would like to see a dynamic player in Blackboard.
  • I would like for instructors to be able to add .srt files to their content so they may caption the video themselves in the LMS.
  • Managing video content with the KMC has greatly reduced the amount of hours previously needed to manage.
  • User issues ie: uploading video, viewing video has been greatly reduced.
  • Increased user engagement with using video in LMS courses. We currently have 6,929 videos on our system. Last month , 2/1/14, 17,623 videos were viewed at least 75% of the way through.
In 2011 we looked at ShareStream and MDID3. Kaltura was the only system at the time that had a Blackboard building block. The newest Blackboard versions have a "video everywhere" feature that connects to a users You Tube account. But a user needs to log into that account before being able to upload the video and unless they have enabled the feature they cannot upload a video longer than 15 minutes.
Since we have many terabytes of data currently stored with Kaltura and the system and it works great, it would be very difficult to move to another system.
We have our KMC and content fully on-prem. I would not recommend this for all institutions. This makes it difficult for Kaltura support to discover and fix issues, it also leaves our system a bit behind on new features in upgrades. I would like to see a SAAS option where we could house the content on our servers. Since we installed Kaltura in 2011 several other companies have emerged and the competition has become more equal.