Kaltura - Blackboard Collaborate Ultra Recordings in Kaltura MediaSpace [UW-Madison]

As of June 30, 2021, Blackboard Collaborate Ultra is no longer available. UW-Madison recommends using Zoom as a replacement for instructional and non-instructional web conferencing purposes.

This document describes how Blackboard Collaborate Ultra content copied into Kaltura MediaSpace looks.

Overview

UW System manages a process from December 2020-June 2021, for copying Blackboard Collaborate (BBCU) recordings to Kaltura MediaSpace. This archive effort was part of a media management process that the University of Wisconsin System implemented to address dramatic increases in the volume of recordings and strict vendor limits on allocated storage. UW-Madison is impacted by this media management process.

For important technical details about how the archive process works, please refer to this UW System documentation.

To summarize:

  • Behind the scenes, a Kaltura MediaSpace account is created for each Canvas course with migrated Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings. These Course Media accounts are assigned ownership of the recordings in Kaltura MediaSpace. They follow this naming convention: CourseMedia-83960-[CourseID]; (ex: CourseMedia-83960-380697).
  • Users with Teacher-based roles in Canvas are given Co-Editor and Co-Publisher rights to the copied recordings in Kaltura MediaSpace through membership in a Kaltura Group created for instructors of that specific course. These Kaltura Groups follow this naming convention:CourseMedia-G-83960-[CourseID] (ex: CourseMedia-G-83960-380697). These Canvas teacher-based roles include all of the following: 
    • Teacher
    • Co-Teacher
    • Staff
    • Course Coordinator
    • Principal Instructor
    • Auxiliary Instructor

When the recordings come into Kaltura, their publishing status is set to Private.

Sharing Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings after they are copied to Kaltura MediaSpace

Once BBCU recordings are in Kaltura MediaSpace, there are a number of options for sharing them with students in your Canvas course:

Identifying Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings in Kaltura MediaSpace

BBCU recordings copied to Kaltura MediaSpace have several characteristics to help distinguish them from other media you upload:
Screenshot of BBCU media item in Kaltura, annotated to show location of information on screen.

File Name

The file name follows the template: Date of Recording (1) - Blackboard Media Name (2). The date will likely differ from the date the recording was originally made in Kaltura MediaSpace.

Owner

Kaltura group name tag shows you which Kaltura group owns the BBCU recording in Kaltura MediaSpace.

The group name follows this convention: CourseMedia-[Canvas Instance ID, which is 83960 for UW-Madison]-(3)[Canvas course ID](4)

Tags

Two tags (5) will be added to the media: course media-g-[83960]-[Canvas Course ID], and bbcollab.

Co-Editor and Co-Publisher

Not shown in the image above, you can also locate media by Co-editor and co-publisher. These will follow the format: CourseMedia, Canvas Session, Canvas Course ID.

Example: CourseMedia-G-83960-[Canvas Course ID]

Creator

The name of the creator of the media is BBCOLLAB-[Canvas Course ID].

Identifying your Canvas Course ID

To identify which course the recording was made in, you can load a new browser tab and in the URL field put in https://canvas.wisc.edu/courses/ + the Canvas course ID.

Can I filter or hide the Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings from the "My Media" view?

At this time there's no way to easily hide these recordings from the My Media view in Kaltura MediaSpace. Learn@UW-Madison is engaging with Kaltura on how the Media I Own filter works to see if this might be possible. Users can use the search and filter functions in My Media to more quickly find media they are searching for rather than scrolling through a large list of media.

Why can't I delete the the Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings?

Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings are owned by a Kaltura group. Group-owned media cannot be deleted. This prevents any one group member from deleting a media item that others in the group may want to keep. The media ownership needs to be assigned to an individual user first and then can be deleted by using the Collaboration feature in Kaltura MediaSpace. Please make sure the other instructors from your course don't need the recording before assigning ownership of a recording to an individual and deleting it.