There is always something special about the month of December. It might be because of the holidays, the snow that starts falling, and the students taking tests and getting a much-needed break. Or it could just be that Mediasite is releasing its latest update! While Santa’s elves have been busy making toys throughout the year, our developers have been busy bringing you some great new features that will improve your use of Mediasite. Here are some of the highlights:
LMS Enhancements: Increasing Student Video Creation & Efficiency
If you are one of our users that has Mediasite integrated with your learning management system, you’ll be excited to hear we have some updates coming to both Moodle and Brightspace. First off, within Brightspace, instructors can now create assignments that require a video submission. Imagine the possibilities to get students involved in their learning. An instructor could have a student record their speech or lab experimentation and then upload it for grading.
Within Moodle, you are now able to directly upload a Mediasite video. This is a feature that has been in some of the other LMSs Mediasite integrates with, like Canvas and Brightspace, for some time and is new to Moodle. What was a two-step process of uploading or recording a video within our personal capture software My Mediasite and then adding it to the LMS has been improved to a single workflow. By streamlining this process instructors won’t need to go back and forth between the LMS and My Mediasite multiple times to add a video to their course.
Caption Editor: Additional Tools to Improve Your Audio Transcriptions
One of the best new features of Mediasite is the caption editor. You can view and edit the captions from you captioning provider. Since machine captioning is never 100 percent accurate, especially those technical terms, Mediasite has a new ‘Find and Replace’ feature. This allows you to search for a term or phrase that may have been used multiple times throughout a presentation, and then you can correct it.
Improved Content Management Options
There are several new features that improve the content management capabilities within Mediasite. The standout feature in this category– adaptive bitrates for user-generated content – gives your viewers a better experience.
Regardless of your viewers’ bandwidth and internet speeds or the way the video was created, they should be able to have a good experience while viewing Mediasite videos. When presentations are uploaded to our personal capture software My Mediasite, they will automatically have adaptive bitrates applied. With adaptive bitrate on My Mediasite content, we are providing the best possible experience for any viewer. The disadvantage of adaptive bitrate is the storage it can take up. To solve this issue, you can also automatically remove it from the My Mediasite content if you don’t want to use this feature.
In addition, anyone who has moved or copied a video knows that it traditionally keeps its permissions, which can be known to cause some difficulty. The latest release of Mediasite has an update that improves how security is handled when a video is moved. Administrators have several options to choose from to define what will happen when presentations are moved or copied. This includes keeping the permissions, inheriting the permission from the new folder, or prompting the user to choose how they would like the security to be handled when moving. Depending on your unique circumstance, the options allow you to set the permissions on the presentation without having to manually do it every time.
This is just a highlight of a few of the most recent updates you will find in Mediasite. For a more complete list, including tutorials on how to use these new features, check out the course on Mediasite U, What’s New in Mediasite Video Platform.