I was starting to set up my Blackboard course for next semester and I thought it might be good for me to take you through how I set up my Blackboard Grade Center before I open the course to my students. I recorded a series of four videos to take you through each step and I posted them below. Please let me know if there are any other videos you would like recorded on using the Grade Center and I can work on adding those to this list.
Click on the images below to watch each video.
In September 2021, Douglas College started a pilot project with Hypothesis to add their social annotation tool to Blackboard. Anyone with a Blackboard course can now add a Hypothesis document to your course and students can work together to annotate the text. This pilot project will continue until the end of the Winter 2022 semester.
To give you an overview of Hypothesis and how it can be used in your course, David Wright graciously offered to record a video with me to take us through how he has used it in his own classes.
If you are interested in learning how to add it to your course, here is a short video on how to do that in Blackboard.
More information on the Hypothesis pilot can be found on DC Connect.
If you want to share a Kaltura video outside of your Blackboard course, you will need to get a public link. Here is a video on how to find that public link to share with others.
With the changes to the Blackboard navigation, some faculty have mentioned they would like to open their courses up in a separate window or tab. Watch this short 2.5 minute video on how to do this.
You would have received a couple of messages recently about Blackboard Collaborate recordings. The summary is this:
If you have ever wanted to download a copy of a video you have in My Media in Kaltura, this is how you can do that.
If you ever wanted to create a simple way for students to choose a meeting time with you without leaving Blackboard, you can do this using the Groups function. This video demonstrates how it works. At the end of the video, you can click on the hotspot on the screen to take you to another video that goes step-by-step through the process of doing this yourself.
Kaltura is a video hosting service we have access to at Douglas College. It works in a similar way that YouTube does, but it is hosted in Canada and has a number of security features that restrict who has access.
As mentioned above, the privacy and security features help the college maintain privacy compliance. It also is a lot less expensive than hosting the videos using Blackboard or other cloud services. In fact, our Blackboard access only has 500mb of storage space per course. That might be enough to host one or two videos at most on Blackboard. Kaltura gives users a lot of space to host their videos without worrying about taking up Blackboard space.
Other than hosting streaming video, Kaltura also has:
This can sometimes be confusing for new users, but it basically goes like this.
My Media = a personal space for each user to host their own videos. No one other than yourself has access to this space.
Media Gallery = a space within each class that everyone in that class has access to. This is where the teacher, and even the students, can share videos they are hosting in their My Media space with the rest of the class. No videos are actually stored in the Media Gallery. It is only a space to share videos.
The easiest way is to create a My Media link in your course module area. When someone in that class clicks on the link, either teacher or student, Kaltura looks at who clicked on it and directs them to that person’s own My Media space. No one would be able to access your My Media space except you.
Here is how to add a My Media link to your course module page.
There are two main ways of getting videos to My Media: upload and record.
Here is how you can upload a video to My Media
There are two ways to record video with Kaltura.
Express Capture is a simple webcam video recording that doesn’t require any installed software. It simply uses your web browser (e.g. Mozilla Firefox) to record a webcam video with sound.
Kaltura Capture is a program you download from Kaltura and install on your computer. It can be used to record screencasts, videos with both a webcam and screen recording. It then uploads those videos to your My Media section of Kaltura.
Here is how to use Express Capture
Here is how to use Kaltura Capture
Kaltura can create machine-generated captions of your videos which can then be edited. The captioning has increasingly gotten better as more people use the service. After saying that, you will likely also want to edit the captions after Kaltura has done its job.
Here is how you can add machine-generated captions and then edit them.
Hopefully that will get you started with Kaltura. In a future post, I will share how to take advantage of the more advanced features of Kaltura.
To email everyone in your course, you can use the email function within Blackboard. It will email your students using their Douglas College email address.
Click on the image below to watch the video (39 seconds).
By default, students will only be able to access your Blackboard course on the first day of the new semester. You may want to make your course available to students before the first day of classes. If you do, here is how you do that.
Click on the image below to watch the video (1 min.).
