University of Edinburgh Puts Video at the Heart of Learning with Kaltura's Media Asset Management System

LONDON, ENGLAND and NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - November 10, 2015) - Kaltura, the leading video technology provider, today announced that University of Edinburgh, which is consistently ranked in the top 50 universities worldwide, has selected the Kaltura video platform for a new Media Asset Management service. Edinburgh is currently piloting the centralized platform with plans to go live University-wide by the start of the 2016 academic year.

The new service puts video at the heart of current and future teaching, learning, research and public engagement activities. The goal is to use video to enrich learning, communicate more effectively to external audiences and further enhance the institution's research activities. All 35,000 students and 10,000 staff - including distance learners - will have access to Kaltura's media asset management tools to create, edit, share, view, re-use and centrally store audio and video content.

With Kaltura's centralized platform, Edinburgh are making a step-change in their approach to media asset management, and this investment is seen as fundamental to achieving their strategy for digital education growth. Students and staff will benefit from the ability to easily create and publish video across multiple platforms including VLEs, the University website, YouTube, iTunesU and academic blogs.

The Kaltura video platform gives Edinburgh the ability to support new video-based activities, including:

• Video-based assignments: these can be recorded on any device by students, edited, and then submitted via the VLEs;
• Personalised video feedback from staff to students or allowing students to record and share video content with their peers/tutors, and use commenting tools to crowdsource feedback;
• A web-based video portal with curated channels of content that showcase great work for sharing within the University community or externally;
• Strengthening the link between research and teaching by discovering great content from research projects and editing these into clips for use in teaching and learning;
• Better accessibility and inclusion through the use of recording tools, transcripts, subtitles etc.;
• The creation of open educational resources, using built-in copyright and publishing workflows, that can be made freely available online;
• Flipped classrooms and streaming of lectures and presentations to remote locations;
• Student revision libraries that hold a wealth of recorded lectures and other content that can be revisited by students at a time to suit them.

Kaltura's in-built analytics will give Edinburgh the ability to track the popularity of pieces of content, the level of engagement and its impact. This information can then be used to refine and adapt the video strategy to further boost interaction to improve learning outcomes.

"Our constant desire to enhance our students' experience made it clear we needed to rethink how we collect, manage and deliver our video and audio assets. We realised that to deliver a 21^st century educational experience, we needed to make it as easy to work with video and audio as it is to create more established forms of content.

We chose Kaltura because it supports our ambition of creating a library of content that can be shared openly and re-used widely, along with a range of easy-to-use creation and editing tools. The ease with which we can create, edit and share content will make it possible for all of our staff and students to benefit from the power of video," said Anne-Marie Scott, Head of Digital Learning Applications and Media at University of Edinburgh.

"Through a series of internal focus groups in early 2014, Edinburgh discovered an appetite to engage more with video content, but the reaction from staff and students was that they felt limited by existing tools. Now, with its multi-platform broadcast strategy, Edinburgh is a trailblazer in the university sector, demonstrating that it understands the power of communicating through video to enhance learning," said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura Co-founder, Chairman and CEO.

About the University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh's mission is the creation, dissemination and curation of knowledge. The University was founded in 1583, making it one of Scotland's four ancient universities. Today, the university is a leading European centre of academic excellence, and is known worldwide for its cutting-edge research in a large number of areas, including Informatics and Medicine. Consistently ranked as one of the world's top 50 universities, Edinburgh is one of the UK's larger, more diverse universities, with a current student population of 35,000 drawn from more than 130 different countries, with students able to choose their studies from more than 300 degree programmes. For more information visit www.ed.ac.uk.

About Kaltura

Kaltura's mission is to power any video experience. A recognized leader in the OTT TV (Over the Top TV), OVP (Online Video Platform), EdVP (Education Video Platform) and EVP (Enterprise Video Platform) markets, Kaltura has emerged as the fastest growing video platform, and as the one with the widest use-case and appeal. Kaltura is deployed globally in thousands of enterprises, media companies, service providers and educational institutions and engages hundreds of millions of viewers at home, in work, and at school. The company is committed to its core values of openness, flexibility, and collaboration, and is the initiator and backer of the world's leading open-source video-management project, which is home to more than 100,000 community members. For more information visit www.kaltura.com, www.kaltura.org, or www.html5video.org.