Online learning business sector is booming and online courses can take many different forms.
At their most basic level, what online course and online learning have in common is that they use online platforms to teach knowledge or skills to anyone who wants to learn them.
Students can access online courses conveniently from anywhere at any time on mobile devices. There are many reasons why online course platforms can benefit from using a video hosting solution.
Importance of video for an online course
Online courses can include educational videos, images, worksheets, audio files and other documents. They often have messaging options, discussion forums and other groups so students can communicate with peers or teachers.
As visual learning is one of the best ways to learn, videos usually form an integral part of an online course. Studies show that people retain much more of the information they see in videos compared with what they retain by reading text.
Typically video lessons are pre recorded, uploaded and arranged on a course platform into a collection of modules. Videos enhance the credibility and increase the value of an online course.
Online courses work best when students have the autonomy to learn at their own pace and videos offer the best way to do this.
Students can pause a video and rewind to listen again to a more difficult section or skip parts they are already familiar with. They can watch a particular video more than once if they battle to grasp the content.
What is video hosting?
Video hosting allows online courses to upload and store videos on a third-party website.
Online course platforms can easily add videos to their websites by creating video templates and using an SEO friendly auto generated video embed provided by video hosting sites.
Using video hosting services like YouTube comes with compromises.
For example, you can embed YouTube videos on your site but they aren’t white-labeled and branded, which means everyone will see them as being hosted on YouTube. Once the videos are indexed on YouTube, your would-be platform visitors can get lost in all the competing traffic and most of the viewers go on to view other videos rather than engage with your platform and website.
Studies show that using YouTube to embed videos on a website will result in fewer website engagement and eventually a drastic drop in revenue.
If you have an online course platform, you need to be sensitive to details like branding, security, analytics and support so it is in your best interests to look at a good video hosting package.
Why is a video hosting solution required for an online course platform?
There are many benefits of using a video hosting solution for your online course platform, such as better security, more advanced analytics, better quality and much more.
Video Security – First and foremost reason for using a video hosting site is security. Online courses need a highly secure platform to ensure that content is confidential and videos are protected.
Some security measures include encryption, password security and watermarking.
Video analytics– Most video hosting sites offer basic video analytics but certain platforms give deeper insights about your videos and your students.
Online courses can receive instant insights into how specific videos are performing and measure engagement, attention span, quiz results and more. Video heatmaps can give an understanding of how students interact with video content on the deepest level.
Video templates – Online course platform can create videos easily by using ready-made video templates on a video hosting sites. Video hosting solution provide many different types of templates in various styles.
These multimedia presentations are very customizable and give online courses full control over what their videos look like.
Quality of Video – Online courses need to be able to upload and share high-quality videos with students, without server lag or the website going down.
Video hosting solutions use virtual data warehousing, upload and track videos with a smooth interface and have the technology and network to deliver videos in many places simultaneously. No matter where people view a video or how many people watch it at once, the videos will load quickly and look great.
Video on Demand (VOD) – With VOD users can select a video from a database of content and watch it instantly whenever they choose and use any device like Samsung TV, Roku TV, Amazon Fire Stick.
Video on Demand compresses and transmits video through an internet connection for a smooth video watching experience across various devices. Users can easily pause, rewind or fast-forward the video to their liking.
Improved Website Performance – Videos are large files and when online course platform upload them to their server, they can take up space, slow down the website and cause errors for users.
Using a video platform means you upload video content onto video hosting site servers and then embedding it into relevant pages of the website, resulting in the website performance and page load speed being optimal.
Digital asset management – Online courses often have an overwhelming amount of video course content. Due to their size and complexity, videos can be challenging to categorize, store and share.
Video hosting solutions offer the opportunity to organize videos and manage users with Digital Asset Management (DAM). Videos can be made searchable and accessible to students, educators and staff with DAM.
Video hosting sites offer features like automatic closed captioning and auto-tagging that enhance search and can be implemented by educators without any problems.
In-video search -Students can easily access specific information inside a video by using an in-video search. This allows them to go straight to the information they’re looking for.
Video chapters– Video chapters can help to divide long videos into many short sections with titles. Students can navigate through different chapters without having to watch a whole video.
Video chapters feature is very helpful when creating tutorials where each chapter represents a different discussion topic.
Why choose a video hosting company with a high-performance CDN?
Video content delivery network (CDN) is a significant aspect of video hosting for online courses.
CDN consists of a group of servers that are geographically distributed and speed up web content delivery by bringing it closer to users. The servers can be found across the globe and make it possible to deliver consistent video streaming quality and speed at scale.
Streaming of video occurs from whichever CDN server is closest to the device of each viewer. Viewers from all over the world can therefore enjoy high-quality video playback without any crashes or lagging.
Hosting and streaming many videos requires high transfer capabilities and is expensive and difficult for online course platforms to use as it is a highly technical process.
An online video platform with a high-performance CDN provides a great solution for online course platforms that require high transfer capabilities.
It may be helpful to think of a CDN as being somewhat like having ATMs situated conveniently in many different locations, which makes it fast and easy to get money wherever you are without having to go into a bank and wait in a queue.
Significance of video hosting platform integration with LMS
Learning Management System (LMS) is a common tool used by online educational institutions to educate students and build websites.
Unlike video hosting platforms, an LMS isn’t designed to stream videos effectively.
LMS also lacks various common and vital features that help to provide a quality learning experience.
Fortunately, it is possible to integrate an LMS with a video hosting platform for a more easily navigable platform.
LMS platforms like HubSpot’s LMS integrate with video hosting platforms to offer a quality video learning experience. There is no need for embed codes as video URLs are automatically converted into mobile-ready embed codes.
Quick, structured learning – Breaking down long training videos makes content more searchable, manageable, quickly playable and viewable.
This is only possible on a user-friendly interface like you have on a video hosting platform. Tools are available to help you organize content and make it easily searchable.
In-video search – In-video search capabilities make information more accessible to students. Students or staff can search for information inside a video and easily fast-forward to where it is inside a video.
Understand how videos impact progress and grades – One of the advantages of integration is that it is possible to synchronize student video completion and viewing data with LMS reports to understand how video is impacting student’s grades and progress.
Conclusion
The size of a video file can strain a network and bandwidth and online course platforms usually use a great quantity of videos.
Online courses need to make sure students can watch videos without experiencing any lag or inferior quality.
Online courses also need to consider details like branding, security, analytics and support. This is why it is in their best interests to use good video hosting solutions.