What can I do with Kaltura?
Both you and your students have full access to Kaltura, so you can use it to create audio and video clips to share with your students, plus you can have your students use it to create media as part of an assignment.
How does Kaltura work?
Kaltura is integrated with Blackboard, so you can access your account through the My Media widget on the Blackboard homepage. Also, you can log in to your Kaltura account at video.maine.edu using your maine.edu credentials.
Kaltura has three main components that you can use to add audio and video to your Blackboard course.
- My Media allows you to access, add, edit, and share media in your Kaltura account. Also, if you’ve already created video or audio files for your students, you can upload them to My Media for easier sharing within your courses.
- CaptureSpace is Kaltura’s desktop recorder. It allows you to record new audio and video files from your computer and/or capture documents or websites open on your desktop.
- Media Gallery allows you to organize all of the media for a single course on one page.
How do I start using Kaltura?
This tutorial covers the basics of accessing Kaltura and creating, adding, and sharing media in your Blackboard courses and other parts of the web.
Access Kaltura in Blackboard
A link to Kaltura automatically appears on Blackboard’s front page in a widget called “My Media.” To find it,
- Log in to your Blackboard account. The system’s home page will be displayed.
- Scroll down to bottom of the page. You’ll see a widget called My Media on the left side. (If you haven’t modified your Blackboard home page, it’ll appear under the “Blackboard Essentials for Students” widget.)
- Click the My Media link in this widget to open Kaltura.
TIP
Drag the My Media widget closer to the top of your Blackboard home page so that it’s easier to find in the future. Just under the Tools widget is a good spot.
Add media to Kaltura
If you have media files on your computer, you can upload them to Kaltura, or you can use it to record new video or audio. To get started with either task,
- Click the Add New button on the My Media page. Its dropdown menu will open.
- Select one of these options:
- Media Upload: Add media files to Kaltura (i.e., ones you have saved on your computer).
- CaptureSpace: Create new video or audio files using CaptureSpace. Once you’ve finished creating new media, Kaltura will upload it directly to your My Media account.
NOTE
Check out University College’s Upload Error page if you get an error while uploading a media file or if you can’t find it in your My Media account after the upload process is complete.
Install Kaltura CaptureSpace
CaptureSpace is Kaltura’s application for recording video or audio. To install CaptureSpace,
- Click the My Media link in the My Media widget on your Blackboard front page. The My Media page will open.
- Click the Add New button.
- Select CaptureSpace from its dropdown menu.
If CaptureSpace has not already been set up on your computer, you’ll automatically be taken to a page to download and install it the first time you try to open it. University College has an introductory video that walks you through this.
Once you’ve installed CaptureSpace, it’ll open automatically whenever you select it in the Add New menu’s options.
NOTE
If you are unable to install CaptureSpace on your computer, contact the Technology Support Center at 1-800-696-4357 or support@maine.edu.
Share Kaltura media in Blackboard
You can share media as a content item, which means it’ll be displayed on its own, or you can embed it within a textbox with other content, like text, images, other videos, etc.
As a Content Item
- Go to the content area in your course where you want to add your media. (If you need to create a new content area first, follow instructions for changing your course menu.)
- Hover over Build Content in the top menu. Its dropdown menu will open.
- Click Kaltura Media; it’s the last link in the “Mashups” section. A list of all of the audio and video files in your My Media account will be displayed.
- Click the Select button to the right of the media file that you want to add to your course. The “Create Mashup Item” page will open.
- Enter a title for your media file.
- Click the Submit button on the bottom-right side of the page. Now your video or podcast should appear as an item in the content area.
Within a Textbox
You can add Kaltura media to any textbox in Blackboard that has a WYSIWYG editor (i.e., it has buttons for formatting options). This includes announcements, content items and folders, discussion threads, and assignment instructions.
- Click the Mashups button. Its dropdown menu will open.
- Select Kaltura Media. A list of all of the audio and video files in your My Media account will be displayed in a pop-up window.
- Click the Select button to the right of the media file you want to add to your course. The My Media window will close, and the media file you selected will appear within the textbox.
Embed Kaltura media on the web
Kaltura provides you with unique HTML code (called an “embed code”) for each of your media files, which allows you to embed it in other parts of the web, like Google Sites, webpages, social media posts, etc.
To find the embed code for one of your media files in Kaltura,
- Go to My Media. You can access it through a link on your Blackboard home page (the system homepage, not your course homepage) or at video.maine.edu.
- Click the thumbnail of the video you would like to embed. The video’s information page will open.
- Click the Share tab. It’s below the video, so you might need to scroll to the bottom of the page to find it. (If your browser window is small, the tabs will instead appear in a dropdown menu under the “Details” button.)
- Copy the text that appears in the “Embed” textbox. This is your embed code; it starts and ends with “iframe”.
- Paste the embed code into the new site where you want your media to be viewable.
NOTE
Different sites manage embed code in different ways. If your media doesn’t appear in a site after you paste your embed code from Kaltura, check its user guide for help.
Edit captions in Kaltura
- Record your video or audio (and follow your script as closely as possible).
- Upload your completed video or audio to the My Media tool in Blackboard (or at video.maine.edu). After your file is uploaded, Kaltura will add machine captions to the media (usually within 90 minutes). A “captioning complete” tag will appear on your media when the captioning process is done.
- Click the title of the video with captions you want to edit. A page with the video’s options will open.
- Click the (a) Actions link below the video to open its dropdown menu, then select the (b) Caption Requests option. A table that displays caption requests for the video will be displayed.
- Click the “Refresh List: CLICK HERE to see all caption requests for this media” link near the bottom of the screen if no caption requests are displayed. Information on the machine-generated captions that Kaltura automatically added to your video will be displayed in the table.
- Click the blue Edit button that appears in the Status column. The Customer Edit page will open.
- Examine the captions on the left-hand side of the page, and copy and paste text from your script into the yellow textbox in the middle of the page to fix incorrectly detected speech.
- Finish editing your captions using one of two options:
- If you need to stop editing captions and come back to finish later, click Save. This will preserve your changes but not make them active when the video is watched.
- If you’re done editing and are ready to make your revised captions viewable, click the green Save button, then the green Approve button next to it.
Caveats
- Videos imported into Kaltura using the YouTube import tool do not get machine captions; however, if the video has captions in YouTube, they will be viewable in Kaltura’s player as well.
- If you try to trim a video that has been captioned, you have to first delete the caption file, then trim the video. Then you’ll need to request new machine captions and fix mistakes in the caption file again.
Want to turn your Kaltura video into an interactive quiz?
You can add multiple choice questions at specific points in a video to create a quiz. Once students take the quiz, it will be automatically graded, and their scores will be added to your course’s Grade Center.
Where can I learn more about Kaltura?
Kaltura provides a wealth of online information that you can consult if you want to learn more about its features. You can also meet with one of CTEL’s learning designers if you’d like more personalized assistance.
