Discussion
My university ditched the embedded video system they were using for online courses for "Zoom clips" and it's fucking stuffed to the gills with AI features that will make it so students don't actually learn anything - there's a fucking homework cheat "helper" built right in that summarizes lectures and gives you homework answers.
I desperately need recommendations for another way to do this.
Anybody know anything about this company? https://spotlightr.com/features/
Other video options?
@sundogplanets I'm afraid you're fighting a losing battle. Technically, there's no way to prevent a video stream from being intercepted – even if it means recording it with a camera.
We'll need different teaching approaches that take the presence of AI into account. Unfortunately.
@sundogplanets Take a look at Infomaniak's streaming service. https://www.infomaniak.com/en/multimedia/streaming/video
@sundogplanets I attended this year's Music@Menlo chamber music festival virtually. They used Vimeo and it worked well. Occasional audio dropouts maybe .1 sec long. Video was solid.
@sundogplanets Does it need to be behind some kind of login / authentication? What LMS are you using?
@floehopper Would be nice if it's not publicly searchable, but doesn't need password protection. My university uses moodle
haven’t done webdev in a hot minute, but here’s some ideas:
1. there was a whole host of modules to bridge #drupal with #moodle. drupal, in turn, has a whole suite of videoconferencing modules that could be adapted for your needs. drupal also has kickass permissions & feed syndication systems. so you can whip up private RSS feeds.
2. after 2020, universities were switching to #nextcloud to avoid Zoom. their media/comms features are excellent
3. both use OAuth/ActPub logins
@blogdiva Wow. This looks great! But is totally beyond my very limited skillset... I appreciate the suggestions though!
@sundogplanets does your university have an institutional repository? Maybe there.
@sundogplanets I probably sound stupid here, but what do you wanna achieve? Realtime online lectures? Or downloadable pre-recorded stuff?
I used in different settings BigBluButton, Jitsi and (hardly recall) Alpha video-call…
@sundogplanets
Hmm…almost as if the administrators are trying to replace the professors…
I eventually want to just make all my lectures public and post everything somewhere public, but that's not happening in the next 6 days for a course that I'm not even teaching myself.
Or maybe I just stop teaching online courses, which I originally started doing during the early pandemic days, then kept doing becuase it makes less work for the underpaid sessionals who teach my classes sometimes.
A few good suggestions so far, but here's more info because the questions made me realize I really didn't include enough:
I just want students to be able to watch pre-recorded lecture videos, semi-private. I don't want them to easily download videos (not sure if that's a silly ask), or easily feed videos/transcripts into gen AI. I DEFINITELY don't want them to have a built-in gen AI system that knows the video contents that they can get homework answers from.
My university uses moodle.
@sundogplanets Not at all on topic of your post but... my grandfather helped build moodle! He wasn't the founder but he joined immediately and got to helping. He was moodle user #2.
@sundogplanets
Unfortunately, any anti-transcript barriers will also make your content inaccessible to the hearing impaired, which is particularly problematic.
@csaetre Yeah I know... there's no winning. :(
(semi-private means for this purpose, non-publicly searchable video platform)
@sundogplanets Non-downloadable is a non starter, as the movie indusry knows. You can always do a screen grab and feed that into an AI.
Non-searchable can be done with robots.txt if the bots behave or with a access control via login codes or something like that.
@sundogplanets Just host it yourself? The bandwidth can't be that high for the videos if the audience is just your students. Then you have full control forever.
I don't have any videos, but I do that for my lecture notes. So much easier in the long run than using any online "platform". If I teach the course again, I can just copy the directory, update a few files, etc.
@sundogplanets Online isn't better for all disabilities, but definitely helps me to have it as an option.
I'm sorry your university has gone over to Zoom. I haven't used Zoom much lately, but last time I did I was really annoyed that they'd shoved AI in.
@ml Yes, that's another reason I like offering at least a couple of online courses. It reaches students who can't come to campus for a variety of reasons (including disabilities, or just living far away).
Zoom is fine for live videoconferences. It is AWFUL for recorded lectures. So frustrating...
@sundogplanets @ml How about Peertube and OBS? You could do a live stream of a lecture and later share the recording.
But how you get the university to install peertube?
I still remember the time when one only needed scp to share stuff.
@sundogplanets Ah, I didn't realize it was pre-recorded video you needed to host.
I boosted to see what others have to suggest. Hopefully someone knows something that will seem good for your situation.
@sundogplanets It would be helpful to know which features you use/need besides plain video.
@ml Just video. Everything else is still fine in the LMS.
@sundogplanets If you have less than 75 people total on the video, you can do Signal. https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360052977792-Group-Video-Calling
I've heard of Big Blue Button, which I think is built on Jitsi.
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