To all MIT faculty and instructors, March 22, 2020,

Dear Colleagues,

Thank you for all that you and your colleagues are doing to prepare for remote teaching starting Monday, March 30. This is truly an extraordinary time in so many ways; what I am hearing back from many departments is inspiring and encouraging but at the same time the challenge is great. Thanks.

As a reminder, my summary message to faculty and departments is here in video form, and at this site you and all your colleagues can find our key reference materials for teaching remotely. On that site, as I described to you in my email back on March 13, you’ll see a range of options for teaching at a distance (both synchronously and asynchronously), from which you may choose as most appropriate to your circumstance.

This email is focused on one, specific, piece of this puzzle: what are the options for where you and your colleagues can put videos?

FOR MIT SLOAN, WHICH USES CANVAS: MIT Sloan courses are automatically scheduled to record within Zoom; to transfer videos to Canvas, see further instructions here. Other video may be uploaded directly to Canvas; see “Videos” located on your Canvas course navigation menu; for help contact Sloan-Canvas-Support@mit.edu.

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The remainder of this email is for MIT outside Sloan.

PLEASE DO NOT UPLOAD ANY VIDEOS DIRECTLY TO STELLAR/LMOD. These systems were not designed to host large files; they will not stand up to it.

There are four alternative options, all of which involve putting the videos elsewhere and putting links to the videos in your Stellar/LMOD pages. Depending on local circumstances, preferences, and what you are familiar with from past experience, people may use any of these four options.

The rest of this email offers you a decision-tree, to provide you with advice as to which option(s) to use.

A. For any videos you make in Zoom, we recommend that you save them there, in the "Zoom Cloud". MIT is paying Zoom for this service and we have a legal agreement protecting data privacy. You can then share a link to that video via your Stellar/LMOD site. [Aside: some are creating videos in Zoom for asynchronous use; some are planning to teach synchronously in Zoom and record the session. Doing the latter should be solely for the purpose of sharing a recording of a class session with the students in your class. We recommend telling your students up front that this is why you are recording the class session, and that this is the only way in which you will use these videos.]

B. For videos that you make in any way other than Zoom:

B1. You can store videos in MIT’s Dropbox. All faculty, instructors & Spring 2020 TA’s have 10 TB Dropbox quota for this purpose now (other staff now have had their quotas increased to 500GB). While Dropbox is good for storage, and videos can stream from there if you put a link to that video into Stellar/LMOD or elsewhere, Dropbox is not principally a video streaming service, so the playback by students may not always be optimal. Other options:

B2. Unlisted YouTube. As long as it’s unlisted, and the link is shared only with our students, this is OK for now, although those videos may need to come down or be captioned after this semester. You also need to understand that if someone circulates links to your videos for some reason, nothing stops someone who is not one of your students seeing them. If the “security by obscurity” of this option is not for you, we have;

B3. ODL Video Service (OVS). OVS is an MIT site, hosted by the Office of Digital Learning. It was designed for other use cases, but it will be of value for remote teaching because it was designed for the purpose of streaming videos only to the people whom you wish to offer them to. You can set up an OVS channel and control access to it securely via IS&T Moira lists, allowing you to stream videos only to your MIT students. (The workflow involves first putting each video in Dropbox.) We recommend OVS over Unlisted YouTube to anyone who prefers this feature, and particularly recommend it if your lectures include copyrighted materials (eg on slides). OVS is also advantageous for students in regions of the world where YouTube is blocked. Videos can only be streamed and not downloaded from OVS. To use OVS, send a request to: odl-video-support@mit.edu.

As a reminder, in addition to our core reference site: teachremote.mit.edu, we have a community site where we welcome the MIT community to post useful resources/ideas/etc: open.mit.edu/c/teachremote.

And all faculty & instructors can get 24x7 support from IS&T by contacting: teachremote@mit.edu or by calling 617-324-3578 (617-32-HELP-U). Many thanks to our colleagues in IS&T and TLL for their leadership and untiring efforts.

All best wishes to you as we navigate these waters together, and stay well…

Sheryl and Krishna

Sheryl Barnes
Director, Digital Learning in Residential Education
sherylb@mit.edu

Krishna Rajagopal
Dean for Digital Learning
krishna@mit.edu