It’s back to school season which means different things for different people. For Mediasite users it means setting up recording schedules, preparing instructors for the concept of lecture capture and (hopefully) perusing the newest features of the back to school Mediasite release.
There are numerous updates and enhancements with this release that touch several areas of Mediasite, including video quizzing, My Mediasite, accessibility and settings in the management portal. Read on for a highlight of just a handful of the features. For the most complete information on the newest features and how to use them, review the MediasiteU Course, What’s New in Mediasite.
Improved Quizzing Features
The quizzing feature of Mediasite has been out for a while, but the newest enhancement that is getting released as a beta feature is the ability to push quiz results back to your learning management system. If you are posting videos with a quiz to your LMS, the quiz results don’t have to stand alone on that video anymore. It’s easy for instructors to view the quiz results and post them back to the LMS gradebook directly in My Mediasite. This helps instructors manage their video content themselves, too.
An additional update with quizzing is that instructors can include an image along with the quiz question. Viewers who take the quiz will see the question as they normally would. However, the image can be used to add more context. This as a fantastic option to set students up for greater success as the visual stimulus increases information retention.
My Mediasite Updates
- Easily manage video engagement: Almost every Mediasite user is familiar with My Mediasite for personal capture and recognizes that it allows simple video management for content creators and non-admin users. Now, there’s a new moderation app within My Mediasite.This is a completely new tool that combines the capabilities of what used to be multiple tools and features. From the moderation app, users can manage the Q&A on a video with the same functionality that was found in the Q&A portal. Users can also manage comments and annotations within a video channel using the app. Comments or annotations can be replied to and hidden or deleted based on date — all from one location. This will encourage content to be reused, because there won’t be a need to record the same video for every semester of the same class. Instead, the instructor can hide the past semester’s comments and annotations and reuse the video.
- Find video details fast: Once you have the latest release installed you will notice some changes to the layout of the presentation details page in My Mediasite. All the video information is now below the video preview and the links to the right are all active and clickable. Upcoming and missed presentations are listed and organized a little differently. This latest release puts presentations in a grid list rather than accordion. The buttons to record the presentation have also been moved from the list view to the presentation details page to make it more consistent with the controls of a blank presentation.
Better Video Accessibility
Our accessibility features have always been a major area of focus in Mediasite, and the latest release is no exception. The accessibility theme of this release is better control of how and when captions are displayed to the viewer. This will ensure that your viewers are getting the high quality, accurate captions that are required.
One of these improvements is a confidence score provided by IBM Watson Automatic Speech to Text that will determine how accurate the captions are on a word basis. Then it automatically displays the captions or hides them for further editing. Additionally, videos that are set to private can be delayed for captioning until they have been marked viewable. This is especially helpful when a video needs to be heavily edited prior to captioning.
More than 50 updates are found in the latest release of Mediasite. For more details on how to use these features, as well as others, visit What’s New in Mediasite on MediasiteU.
