TAs: Tips for Making and Managing Videos

TAs might be asked to do a number of tasks involving videos or other media. These include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Record a presentation for students to watch.
  • Upload a presentation prepared by the teacher to the class website.
  • Add closed captioning to a video.
     

This file contains some information about making and managing videos. This is, of course, a large topic, and the links here are not comprehensive. But they cover some of the more important things to know.

Making Videos: Tools

There are a large variety of tools for making videos. Any tool that results in reasonably good quality, and avoids issues like unusual file formats should be fine. Videos can be made either of synchronous class meetings or for asynchronous presentations. 

Here are some details and links for two common options: Zoom and Kaltura.

Zoom can be used to record either synchronous or asynchronous presentations. The steps are much the same for both options; however, for asynchronous presentations you will likely be the only person at the meeting. Here are the steps.

  • Start the meeting. (To record, you either need to be the meeting host or co-host.)
     
  • Start the recording by pressing the record button, and then selecting the “record on this computer” option. (Do not record to the cloud; the U does not have sufficient cloud storage for Zoom recordings.)
     
  • Once the meeting is done, stop the recording.
     
  • Once you end the meeting, Zoom will take a few minutes to produce the recording files. There will be a video file that has both video plus audio, plus an audio only file if you wish to let students hear the audio without video.

 

A few tips:

  • If you are unfamiliar with Zoom, there is online documentation about using it.
     
  • If you have breakout rooms, then the recording will follow you into the breakout rooms. For this reason you should probably pause the recording during breakout room time.
     
  • During the meeting you may pause the recording or stop the recording. You may then resume or restart later in the meeting if you wish. Pausing/resuming will continue the previous recording. Stopping/restarting will produce separate recording files; for example, if you stop and restart once in the middle of a meeting you will get two video files.
     
  • Once you record the Zoom video, you then need to upload it so it can be accessible to the students. See the “Uploading” section below.
     
  • See the remainder of this file for some additional information that might be useful to know about recording videos using Zoom.

 

Kaltura is a media management system, and is another possible way to record material, particularly asynchronous material. General information about Kaltura is on the U’s Office of Information Technology Kaltura page. 

There is often more than one way to perform a task using Kaltura. In particular, you may record material as explained in either of the two following links:

Kaltura has been integrated into Canvas. See the next section for more information.

Making Videos: Some Tips

There are, of course, a large variety of resources about making educational videos. Here are a few possibilities. Choose one or more (or find other resources on your own) that look most relevant to your class.

Accessing Videos from a Class Canvas Website

Once you have made a video, you need to make it accessible to a class website. This section assumes you are using Canvas for the class site. 

Video or other media files can be stored in a number of places, including in Kaltura MediaSpace, in Google Drive, and on YouTube. Wherever you might store video files it is important that any student-specific information, including student names, pictures, discussion, or work, is accessible only with the class, and not more widely — see the section below for more information.  

The remainder of this section discusses storing material in Kaltura MediaSpace, and then accessing it from a class Canvas site. A step-by-step guide for doing this is Canvas: Add Media from Kaltura Using the Rich Content Editor. This gives instructions for uploading content, if needed, and then making it accessible on the Canvas site. 

A few notes:

  • If you recorded your media files using Kaltura Capture or MediaSpace, you should skip the upload step in the guide. If you recorded it using Zoom or some other non-Kaltura tool, you will need to do the upload.
     
  • Depending on your Internet connection upload speed, any uploading might take some time.
     
  • The link above (about adding media from Kaltura to Canvas) contains the needed information for making the video files accessible on the class website.
     
  • Kaltura does have some simple video editing capabilities (but not advanced ones), for example simple fade-ins, or the ability to set start or end times other than the actual start or end of the video. See the Kaltura video editing page for more details.
     
  • If you only wish to upload material, and not link it (yet) to your class website, you can follow the simpler sets of steps in the guide  Kaltura MediaSpace: Upload Media.

FERPA Compliance

As a general rule any recordings that have student-specific information in them should not be accessible to anyone who is not a student in the class or not the teacher or one of the TAs. This is a federal law (not just a University rule), so it is important to follow it. Here is some more information:

Closed Captioning

If you produce a video you might need to close caption it (your teacher will let you know if this is required). Even if close captioning is not required, you might want to do it anyway, since some students find closed captioning useful in their learning.

There are a number of ways to generate closed captioning. For example, Kaltura will automatically generate closed captions when you either use it to record material, or when you upload material, e.g., material previously recorded via Zoom. (It will take a while, perhaps a couple hours, for it to generate captions for large files.) See the links under “Edit Media” and “Work With Captioning” on the Kaltura MediaSpace Upload and Manage Media page.

Important note

The automatically generated captions are somewhat but not entirely accurate. If you are required to provide closed captioning, for example, due to an accommodation from the Disability Services Office, then someone will need to check and correct the auto-generated captions. The Disabilities Services Office might be able to do this if they are provided with the needed material and they have ample time to do it. (If the teacher asks you to coordinate this with Disabilities Services, the teacher will need to give you some instructions about contacting them.) Alternatively, if you need to correct the captions, see the link in the last paragraph for information on how to do this.

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