Kaltura is a New York-based software company founded in 2006. The Kaltura Video Platform for Education includes a range of products for virtual classrooms, lecture capture, webinars & live events, and student outreach. Learning from a screen made many students feel isolated, left behind, unmotivated, and detached from the classroom environment. Based on this observation, the Politehnica University of Timisoara started to enquire about how to make blended and online learning more engaging for students, sharing with the education experts and many other teachers around the world, examples of virtual classroom ideas for fun activities that increase engagement, testing different platforms and formulating guidelines for:
- Supporting blended learning: The nature of Kaltura encourages the development of educators’ professional activities and qualities such as integrity, respect, collaboration, and communication. It also promotes the sharing of best practices, knowledge improvement, and digital skills detection, based on high hopes for a 100% blended learning in the future.
- Supporting Professional Engagement: Kaltura platform supports professional Engagement involved in the activities of educators and students by bringing together the best online and hybrid classroom features in a single workspace. Kaltura provides solutions for a customized, user-friendly, and integrated learning experience. Here several features of Kaltura supporting professional engagement are described.
- Supporting Digital Resources: Fully customizable, the Kaltura Virtual Events platform provides the full range of video technology to support any event, of any size. Multi-day, live keynotes, webinars, lectures, workshops, or 1:1 chat, the Kaltura Virtual Events platform provides the full video tech stack built into the platform.
- Supporting Teaching & Learning: Joining the virtual classrooms with no downloads or installations required, preparing the class in advance, interactive Tools for learners, fully managing the Classroom, learning from anywhere and anytime, record, Polish, Publish & Repeat.
- Supporting Assessment: Kaltura platform contains brandable persistent classrooms and breakout rooms that instructors can prepare in advance and save. Kaltura also provides collaborative whiteboards, screen sharing, real-time note taking, polls, and quizzes, and also collaboration and communication. Hence, the educator can easily monitor and assess student performance with session analytics, attention indicators, and attendance information.
- Supporting the Empowerment of Learners: Polls and Quizzes to create a classic multiple-choice quiz, but also mix it up and create true or false statements, odd-one-out, etc. Think-Pair-Share that builds the student thinking, collaboration, and communication skills; Virtual games that gets everyone to contribute their bit to the lesson; Digital Escape Rooms for breakout rooms.
- Facilitating Learners’ Digital Competence: There are several digital competencies (EU DigComp for Educators) that are enabled by the use of Kaltura by educators and students ( Digital Resources, 3. Teaching and Learning, 6. Facilitating Learners’ Digital Competence). Hence, students are empowered and encouraged to use media-rich materials to respond to different activities, create resources, and integrate them into learning.
