While I have played multiple roles in the deployment of many different learning technologies over the years, for this section I will focus on the leadership role I played in a large-scale piloting and deployment of Kaltura as a provincial wide higher education shared service.

Description

Kaltura is an enterprise level media streaming and hosting service commonly used in education as a streaming media alternative to YouTube and Vimeo. It was of interest to BC post-secondary institutions primarily because provincial privacy legislation in British Columbia made using video services hosted outside of Canada problematic, including Kaltura’s own SaaS service. However, Kaltura did have a On Premisise version of their platform that could be hosted locally and provide a regional equivalent of Kaltura’s SaaS based media service. The challenge was that most institutions in BC could not afford the technical overhead to host their own instances of Kaltura. Yet there was a real demand among institutions for a streaming media service.

In 2013, BCcampus was tasked with leading a pilot project of Kaltura. I was brought in to manage the project shortly after it began in 2014 until we transitioned the service from a pilot to an operational shared service with our system partners BCNET in 2017 . Specifically, my role in the project was to;

• Work with our institutional partner, the University of British Columbia, to architect and deploy a scalable on prem Kaltura instance that would scale up to mee the needs of up to a possible 25 post-secondary institutions.
• Develop sustainable business and operational models with our provincial system partners BCNET,
• Pilot the new on prem Kaltura service with a small handful of early adopter institutions,
• Develop a Kaltura User Group in order to provide support on both the technical and pedagogical uses of the platform,
• Providing the pilot was a success and there was suitable uptake from institutions, to transition the pilot service from BCcampus to BCNET to become an operationalized shared service.

Reflection

Incredibly complex, yet highly rewarding.

Still represents one of the most successful shared service deployments in the province, and was an important proof of service success that showed a new working relationship between BCcampus and BCNET could provide valuable education technology shared services to the BC post-secondary system.

Evidence

• Presentation 2017 BCNET Conference, the year the service transitioned from being a pilot with BCcampus to becoming operational with BCNET. This presentation shows how we structured the shared service as an OnPrem service with our institutional partner UBC, and the operational role that BCcampus played moving forward in providing Tier II support services to institutions who participated in the service.
• Expanding the Effective Use of Video at BC Institutions with Kaltura (Presentation slides, 2016 Festival of Learning, Vancouver BC) I coordinated and hosted this presentation from various members of the BC Kaltura User Group as a way to promote the effective pedagogical use of video that the newly launched Kaltura Shared Service offered to institutons.