Lessons From Leaders - Purdue University

Purdue Expanding the Reach and Footprint of Video: How Purdue Implemented Kaltura Across the Campus

How do you determine a video strategy? Adam Hagen walks through the best practices for integrating video into an LMS to achieve maximum reach and adoption. From determining which integrations and devices you will need to take into account to estimating storage and streaming needs, discover who you need to talk to and what questions you need to ask. Learn how to enable multiple methods of easy video creation and explore some innovative use cases. This panel gives you everything you need not only to organize your video solution but to drive the adoption and usage rates you need to achieve success.

Transcript

Welcome everyone. I'm glad that you could join us today. And I thank Kaltura for the opportunity to speak to you all. My name is Adam Hagen. I am an Educational Technologist at Purdue University and I work in the Teaching and Learning Technologies Group.

And I'm going to talk to you today about how we've managed to try to do our cross-campus deployment of video in general. And not only just tell the story. Beyond that narrative with some tips and tricks that I've learned along the way so you don't necessarily make some of the same mistakes and just some things to consider that is just crucial and critical when you're going to try to deploy video across campus.

Core Requirements

So first of all -- And if you haven't thought of these to date -- And these were things that we considered when we started to get into this journey and they seem simple but they really are mission critical when you start to deploy video. So the first thing is really truly identify what your core requirements are up front. You don't want to select a product and hope that it fits around your use case.

So some of the questions that I've included here Does this have to work with an LMS? Is this going to be working with other platforms that you have? It really is critical to know that. What devices are your faculty how are they viewing video? Are they on desktops? Are they on mobile devices? You need to be able to optimize your delivery based on how your end consumer is really going to be watching that media. Which groups of campus need to be involved in the decision making? And this can be somewhat difficult at first. Everybody wants their hands on things like this but who are your key constituencies? Do you need to bring in faculty members? Do you need to bring in people from departmental IT? Do you need to have different groups across your central IT organization? You really need to make sure you have all the key players in this initial process before you get started. Otherwise you're going to be playing catchup after the fact. How much storage and streaming will you need?

And I will put the disclaimer on this -- whatever it is you think you need -- And we've grown by leaps and bounds. We'll talk about some numbers in a little bit. But really try to get a grasp on how much you are going to need. And then again is the product? And again How will this tool need to morph just to meet your basic needs? So what we needed when we actually looked at that series of questions we really needed a unified solution for video.

And we had several core requirements that we identified that they were deal breakers. I mean that we had to have cross-platform integrations. Primarily through our LMS and at Purdue we use Blackboard Learn in Sharepoint Video and Blackboard is great. So we also needed something as a standalone. Central IT does provide services but there are some groups on campus that decide they don't want to go with the traditional LMS. Or they want to do things a little bit differently. Or different organizations within the university that aren't necessarily academic. And how are they going to be able to use this when they're not living necessarily within that academic space? So we really did need to find some platform that was going to span all of those realms.

The other big case that we had to have was the idea of ease of use. So if you're a technology adoption person where you work in an IT organization that you're going to realize is that if something isn't easy to use it's never going to be adopted or at least not widespread adoption when we try to launch some of these programs. Mobile are the faculty and if it's not mobile compatible to have that.

The other one was analytics and reporting. If you don't know that people are watching the videos how can you actually see that you're getting any return on your investment this content and it's just not something that you're throwing money at? So what we actually did that seemed to meet all of our needs.

Implementation

And we started a pilot in the fall of 2012. But when I say that we did a pilot, we really started flipping switches on and just let people find the product and start to tinker with it and make it beneficial to education. Now is well how do they actually find it? I mean And many faculty members or a new option and they just start uploading video. But to really make sure that they're going to get more whether it's newsletters every day to faculty and staff. But we tried to sneak it in and just kind of sprinkle it in all of our other offerings.

So multiple times a semester faculty who just want to kind of get up to speed. But we'd sneak that in there. And so into my course in Blackboard Learn. And so one small step actually gives you more exposure to the product. And it really has helped to grow that. We always in users groups we always bring it up. What else do we have that's out there? And it's just not Kaltura. We do this for other services as well the higher the probability that you're going to have people actually picking up on the product and trying to use it in innovative ways. And then we also have tech sessions that we historically run and if people are interested in video this is what you can do.

Results

Okay so when we launched that pilot back in the fall of 2012 and we turned on the ability for faculty members and then students we were pretty excited. We had nearly 13 entries that first semester. And so we were ecstatic. What we didn't anticipate was seeing that the following semester the number of entries we had in the system had doubled. And the number of plays had actually tripled. And coming up to the current date you know how successful the service can be. In our efforts to beat anybody over the head with it that we've had 94. And just to kind of put it in perspective about how much bandwidth and storage are you actually going to need? It's going to continue to grow over time.

We never would have thought that three years ago. So another way if you want to try to get people to buy into these systems your early adopters who tend to be on the bleeding edge And we'll work these into training sessions and direct consults with faculty members faculty focus articles in the email newsletter that I talked about before. Because when people see interesting ways that the product can be used.

So one that always comes to mind is this idea of video quizzing and assignments. And our American Sign Language Department where not only do they distribute quizzes to the students to try to assess whether or not they actually understand the subject matter but it's based on video. You can see it can turn on a webcam rather than having to waste valuable hours that would have previously had to have been done face to face. So that's an invaluable -- the use of video for reflection on this activity or on this exercise?

Our School of Pharmacy and our Communication Department they do this all the time. The pharmacy students are required to work in the on-campus pharmacy. And they are recorded. It's an automated process that when they begin to have an interaction with a customer immediately the camera comes on and they can go back and look -- what can I do to improve? Where were those points that -- How am I progressing? So reflection. It's a great use of video. And I'm so glad that we've got it.

And then peer collaboration. There just doesn't have to be one way to deliver a video. You've also got some interactivity. It's two-way communication when we get into things like web conferencing. And we have our own web conferencing solution that we've kind of landed on. And we've got our Biology and Engineering Departments who are using video collaboratively amongst the students ind of work in small groups led by team mentors to be able to kind of evaluate.

So when we take these use cases and we use them as examples coming in and want to get involved and get their hands on the service. But beyond delivery if you really want a good buy-in for video in general across the campus that faculty members have a means to actually create video. So we have a license for Camtasia. And so that's a good service do a quick screen recording or make a recording with their webcam try to do some just-in-time instruction And so that was great for us. And then moving a step forward that we call Video Express. I've talked to some of my colleagues about this this week. And it seems like everybody is looking for some sort of self-service video production. How can we make quality video it's got to be easy to use. So we've launched a series of studios on campus. We've also got some of our offsite locations but some of our other institutions. But it's actually they have a green screen behind them and you can see that in the graphic as well. And so far it's been working great.

So if you want to just talk usage we haven't even got to a full two years with these studios yet. But we had 900 videos starting in 2013. And we had a very small number of studios that were online. But you jump to today just this year -- this calendar year over 12.

And most of these we've kind of looked back at it -- they are significant videos. People are downloading them. They are using them. They're watching them. And so that's critical again to be able to go back and assess for the expenses that we've made and the investment that this has to pay off for us? Are people using it? And then is it being used after they use this?

And then we've designed a web portal where they can get in with other people on campus. They can do a direct upload to Kaltura using the API which has been great. I want to say that we've got about 41% of videos that are actually making it in there. Many are also getting there but not directly through the website. And again just to kind of give you a feel for what the end user experience is so the image that we have on the left is our current interface. So it's a touchscreen. The faculty member or staff member literally walks in. They log in. They click start. And if that button returned to stop is automatically going to be processed and available for upload in Kaltura. They've got a swap screen that they can immediately swap out. Do they want the PC display to be shown? Do they want themselves front and center? And again we're trying to make it better. So on the right But this is where we're going to try to go with that. So people always ask about the interface so I wanted to show that.

So another thing that you're going to want to consider is how do you intend to manage your data retention in the long term? When you go out and you sign up with some vendor It doesn't matter how many terabytes it is based on your institution but that space is going to get burned up relatively quickly. I kind of showed you some of the usage statistics that we've seen over time that we are at today. So do you plan on purging media after a certain period of time? Are you going to do that as a hard limit in number of months or number of years? Or are you going to base it on when was the content last viewed? I mean that could be used in the future that you want to implement. How are you going to pull this off? Again how do you enable content creation for users? Are you going to have studios that they can walk into? Are you going to have other software services that they can use and take advantage of to try to create video? But at the end of the day a mechanism for creation. And then again Just putting it into place really isn't enough.

At the end of the day ask the questions surveys to faculty and students trying to see what they thought of the product. Was it effective? Was it enhancing instruction that we were getting an educational benefit from it? And across the board And then again could potentially arise? So I would strongly encourage all of you talk to your coworkers. Talk to other departments on campus. And get a feel for what they could possibly do. The stars are the limit on this. You don't want to try to box yourself in. And so really And so when you're trying to identify a service but try to think forward. What could people be using this for in 5 years. The time span really If it's at all possible So again It's been a pleasure to talk with you today. And I again thank Kaltura for welcoming me to this event. And we will move over to the live Q&A. Thank you.