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Important information for colleagues with uploaded videos on the Video Portal

27 Feb 2024

If you use video portal videos on external services (such as Articulate Rise and Storyline, SoftChalk, Nearpod, H5P and so on) an upcoming change may affect the visibility of your videos.

This is a follow-up to the announcement on Thursday 9 November about "Changes to the usage of video portal videos on external websites” with the intention to provide some clarity to questions raised and who needs to take action.

Though it was always the policy of Podcasting service to only allow public videos to be used on third party websites, a change made to the service in Summer 2021 unfortunately created a loophole where, if the embedded player was placed on a third-party site, it would grant access to non-public videos. We need to close this loophole, which is why we are asking some colleagues to make changes to their video settings or third-party content now, ahead of planned changes.

If you have a video hosted on the Video Portal with 'visible to' set to 'Only me' or a ' Selected group' (course unit, Faculty etc.) please read the following two statements carefully:

1. You DO NOT need to take action if a video is:

  • Embedded directly into a Blackboard space.
  • Embedded directly into a University environment that requires login via the Central Authentication System (CAS), for example, 1Med.
  • Embedded into a SCORM package (Using Rise, SoftChalk or similar) but hosted on Blackboard.
  • Embedded into an HTML package but hosted on Blackboard or another University environment that requires CAS login.

2. You DO need to take action if a video is:

  • Embedded into Rise / SoftChalk or similar resource that is hosted on a third-party cloud service (for example, SoftChalk cloud or Articulate.com)

If statement 2 applies to you, then you must take one of the following actions before Monday 1 July 2024.

  1. Export Rise / SoftChalk (or similar) as a SCORM / HTML package and upload it to the Blackboard course. The content and video is then served by Blackboard and does not require changes to its settings. We acknowledge that this does requires more effort to maintain.
  2. If appropriate for the content, change the 'visible to' setting to 'public'. NOTE: this only works for videos in organisations (such as faculty/school/department). If the video is in a course, it would need to be moved to the appropriate organisation first, before changing the visibility.

If you require further assistance from your eLearning team or the Video Portal team, please complete this short survey: