When I came to UMW last year there were few options available to students and faculty that wanted to publish media content online. We’ve always encouraged folks to push their stuff to YouTube, Vimeo, or Blip where the hosting was free and the embedding options were simple. We even made it easy to embed in blogs by making use of plugins like Viper’s Video Quicktags which works like a charm (oembed options now are pretty good too, but a bit hit or miss occasionally). That being said the issues surrounding copyright of educational content online has made the waters a bit muddy. Student work gets pulled from YouTube and thus begins the game of cat and mouse finding where and how long a video can be up on a service before getting pulled for daring to include any content that a company might decide to claim ownership of. Meanwhile for departments that were creating fully originally content that they might not want hosted on free and ad-supported networks there was little recourse. I … [Read more...]