Announcing MediaCore

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I am happy to finally be able to announce that the University of Mary Washington has partnered with MediaCore to run a pilot installation of their media platform. MediaCore will mean many things to many people, but more generally it will give members of the UMW community the ability to control and curate their media collections. It will be more than just a “campus YouTube”.

Speaking of Youtube, we all know it and (mostly) love it. However, when it comes to student media projects, especially when they are incorporating copyrighted material and using it every bit within the fair use clause, they can still get dinged with the takedown algorithm hassle. 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 within an educational context and on 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 – what UMW uses as its university LMS.

MediaCore is also “mobile ready”, and 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 that you might have just shot. It includes any media that you have saved to your “camera roll” (I can’t speak to how it works on Android devices, but I imagine it’s similar). So this might 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 LTI 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 WordPress or Canvas plugin interfaces.

So we will try to push MediaCore to its limits and see what’s possible. MediaCore support have been very responsive to questions as well as suggestions for new features. So let the pilot begin!

The UMW instance of MediaCore will be located at http://mediahub.umw.edu. For more information on the UMW MediaCore installation, we will keep all of our resources at the UMW New Media MediaCore page.

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