Fall 2015 Update to Mediathread

by | Aug 25, 2015 | Announcements

The Mediathread Fall 2015 release includes upgrades to assignments, mobile compatibility, course vocabulary support, and performance. 

Now available to instructors setting up their courses, the upgrades include:

Selection Assignment

Instructors can now set up assignments in Mediathread designating a specific video, audio file, or image for students to analyze. A Selection Assignment tracks student selections of, and annotations on, the media object being studied. A student response to a Selection Assignment can include one or more annotations. When setting up a Selection Assignment, instructors designate whether and when students can see each other’s responses. Instructors can easily scan all submitted responses and post private feedback.

Mobile Upload

Columbia University students and instructors can now upload videos to theirMediathread course collections from smart phones directly through major mobile browsers (Android Chrome & iOS Safari; Chrome on iOS is not yet supported). This feature is not currently available beyond Columbia University. More on uploading to Mediathread.

Course Vocabulary Support

The Mediathread team at Columbia and partners at Dartmouth University have continued to develop and deepen the Mediathread Course Vocabulary infrastructure. Developed by Dartmouth’s Media Ecology Project, onomy.org allows researchers and instructors to set up and manage controlled vocabularies, which can now be exported into Mediathread and applied to media objects. The Course Vocabulary interface in Mediathread has been updated so that users can search and apply large vocabularies. More on Course Vocabularies.

Performance upgrades

The Mediathread development team at Columbia has completed a number of infrastructure upgrades, improving the platform’s speed and reliability. These upgrades are detailed on GitHub.

Columbia University instructors can contact the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning for consultation and help setting up a Mediathread course site, or attend workshops on the way it supports close reading and analysis of media objects (next workshop is on Sept. 4). Anyone beyond Columbia is welcome to access a Mediathread sandbox to try out features. Its code is also available on GitHub for partner institutions and the open source community. More information on Mediathread is online here.