March 29, 2024

Announcing MediaCore

The Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies is pleased to announce that it has partnered with MediaCore to run a pilot installation of their media platform. MediaCore will give members of the UMW community the ability to control and curate their own media collections. It will be more than just a “campus YouTube”.

Students having their own media space is crucial for their experimentation and expression (kind of like “Domain of One’s Own“). What better way to do it than within an educational context and a platform that is specifically geared toward educational media hosting. MediaCore will serve that function and allow students to share their media work locally behind a login, or make their work public when they want/need to.

The other idea behind using MediaCore is the idea of curating “collections”. Youtube, Vimeo, and even content from TED Talks and Archive.org can be curated by a user to share unique combinations of media elements. It allows the viewer to go to one place to view media from disparate places. “Playlists” can then be easily incorporated into a WordPress site, or in Instructure Canvas – the university Learning Management System.

MediaCore is also “mobile ready”, from both a viewing aspect as well as an “ingestion” aspect. MediaCore’s Capture app for mobile devices allows a user to capture video and upload directly into their MediaCore space. However, it’s not limited to video. It might also include images, screenshots, screencasts, or other video produced in any app that saves to your smartphone.

Finally, what will make MediaCore special to the UMW community is the integration with WordPress (both UMW Blogs and the Domain of One’s Own initiative) and with Canvas. MediaCore makes available a WordPress plugin and Canvas integration that will allow users to post video to a WordPress post or page, and any Canvas area (pages, modules, etc.) that uses the visual text editor. You can also upload video to MediaCore through the WordPress or Canvas plugin interfaces.

The UMW instance of MediaCore will be located at http://mediahub.umw.edu. We will be limited to 100 accounts that will be able to view and upload content privately, but all of the UMW community will be able to see any video that is made public. For more information on the UMW MediaCore installation, visit the UMW New Media MediaCore page.