The NMC is pleased to annouce that we have partnered with Kaltura, the world's first and only open source online video platform. Kaltura provides industry leading media management applications as well as framework for developing custom apps. They provide their customer base of educational institutions, enterprises, and media companies with flexible media solutions to cover all of their video needs.

Kaltura currently works with a number of universities, including the Harvard Business School, Columbia, and MIT, to enrich teaching and learning and other areas of campus life through video. Their platform serves as a central media portal where institutions can upload and aggregate course videos, student testimonials, and more. "Any user is now a media producer," explains Michal Tsur, Kaltura President and Co-founder. "The portal is where they can capture exactly what is happening in life."

The beauty of this solution is its flexibility. Kaltura's education platform evolved from working with early adopters, such as Rutgers University, to indentify critical video needs. As a result, the video portal can be integrated into all the major learning managment systems (LMS), like Blackboard and Moodle, or made a completely separate entity. In that respect, it is as great of a solution for complex customization as it is right out of the box. The privacy settings can also be customized so that only certain people can upload and view videos (eg, students enrolled in a particular course) or so that everything is completely public -- whatever suits the insitution's goals.

“Video is a great tool for engaging students throughout their life cycle at the university, from admissions to teaching and learning to searching for information in the library systems to social life to alumni clubs,” says Tsur. What is particularly interesting is that we have always seen video as a way to document important subjects and disseminate and share content, but Kaltura has also capitalized on video as an organizational tool. When videos are uploaded to the portal, they become entirely searchable -- if a user needs to see a specific one-minute portion of a longer video, they can pinpoint that portion with a quick in-video search. Information becomes conveniently archived and easy to find this way.

In addition to providing this open source video platform, Kaltura has a strong community apsect, offering support to both customers and to the public. They hold various webinars and meet-ups throughout the year. And, to make sure you never miss out, we'll be posting them to our NMC events calendar.

If you have any questions about Kaltura, they would love to hear from you here. Want to try out Kaltura? Good news -- there is a free trial.

Interested in a corportate partnership with the NMC? We'd love to speak with you. Contact nancy@nmc.org.