Faculty Story: Kaltura for Medicine

Read about a UBC example of using Kaltura, featuring Dr. Joseph Anthony, Clinical Professor, Physical Therapy, Faculty of Medicine. Joseph uses Kaltura to share videos with graded quizzes.

UBC Kaltura Example for Medicine

How did you use Kaltura in your course and what made you decide to do this?

One of my courses is a blended course—about one quarter of the content I teach in that course is now online, instead of face-to-face. A large portion of the online content is comprised of short (5-10 minute) videos. A second course that I am involved with is completely online and makes extensive use of instructional video. I use Kaltura to host all these videos. I had heard that Connect [the primary learning platform at the time] was not great at video streaming, and so early on I decided to adopt Kaltura.

With Canvas, uploading the videos into the files area may exceed the course space limit and affect the course performance. Of course, I was helped in this decision by the very user-friendly interface between Canvas and Kaltura.


What has been your experience so far?

I have found Kaltura to be very stable and usable.

Only once in my memory has something gone awry, and this was very quickly addressed by the LT Hub. The problem was caused by my using old embed links from a previous iteration of the course, and something had changed in Kaltura to make these codes not function. It was an easy fix. With the above exception, I don’t recall hearing any student complaints about their Kaltura experience.


What are some challenges/successes in using Kaltura in your practice?

Really I cannot think of any challenges using Kaltura. The interface for uploading and then embedding into a course is very intuitive and the system just works as intended.

I think being able to successfully stream instructional video content to a group of eighty students without issues is very satisfactory.


What is your advice for new users of Kaltura?

I would encourage everyone who has video to stream in their course to use Kaltura, especially if they need to control access to the video source file. Kaltura uses embed codes to link to the video. In this way, it is easier to keep control of the video (i.e., make it harder to download). We have some videos that have restrictions on access, due to permissions that were granted by the people being filmed, and we need to control access to the file—streaming is okay, downloading is not. Unless we use Kaltura and embed codes, we cannot control access to the source file in Canvas.

I think it is so useful that Kaltura allows instructors to build interactive quizzes directly in the video.

This means that I can pause my video at any point I choose and pose one or two simple questions to check learner understanding. Learners respond to my quiz, and then the video will resume. I can have multiple quizzes in any video. The results of the quiz can even be reported to Canvas Gradebook! I see lots of potential for this—great opportunity to add an activity or two into video watching. It’s good to know that the original videos are untouched—Kaltura creates a copy that contains any quizzes, so you can always go back to the original if you need to.


Faculty and staff looking for Kaltura support, please contact us at the LT Hub.

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