EduTech leader, Boclips, deploys Blackbird to scale demand for e-learning video content

Posted: 05/05/2021

The pandemic has become a watershed moment in education, and for hybrid and blended learning in particular. Study and training have continued apace as schools, universities, and workplaces have wholeheartedly embraced a new educational reality – a mix of in-person and online learning.

These circumstances have accelerated an acceptance of what the research has long demonstrated to be true. That video is a surefire way to increase student engagement within and without the classroom. Whether supporting learning in the classroom, online remotely, or in combination, video has proved itself an invaluable tool for keeping the educational machine running and Boclips is at the heart of the enterprise.

The EduTech leader is on a mission to make learning more captivating with video with an easier, safer way to access content from the world’s leading video producers.

Its cloud-based educational platform provides teachers and courseware developers with simple access to over two million rights-ready curated video clips from the world’s most respected content producers.

Collaborative, dispersed global production teams

The globally distributed Boclips production team use Blackbird to rapidly access all incoming video content. Covering a wide range of topics and learning objectives, Boclips extensive library includes high-quality content from news producers such as Sky, PBS and Bloomberg, talks and lectures from TED Talks and Crash Course, and teacher-led materials from Boseman Science and Flipping Physics. 

Working remotely, the entire team can access Blackbird’s browser-based professional level toolset to rapidly edit and enrich content for publishing to the Boclips platform for immediate availability to its global community. Blackbird is also enabling Boclips to search and retrieve content from its AWS storage solution for re-versioning work so that the value from assets can be realised effectively

“Blackbird will dramatically speed up our video production capabilities and drive significant efficiencies throughout our operations. We’re excited to be working with a fantastic partner that offers such a great solution for our video workflow.”

Rob Weeks, Head of Content Operations, Boclips

With the global e-learning market expected to grow to $275 billion by 2022, according to a report by Orbis Research, and over 5 billion videos watched on YouTube daily, the appetite for both online learning and video is huge and growing.

Video is also the preferred learning method over traditional textbooks for Generation Z. It makes sense then that the preferred learning method of subsequent generations will be video-based learning too. Old school chalk-and-talk is going the way of the dinosaur. 

While it’s clear that video is effective, the challenge for instructional designers becomes how best to restructure video and video-based activities into a hybrid learning model.

Video-based learning without reinventing the wheel

“Segmenting information into more digestible chunks not only increases student engagement, but allows them to make the most of available time within their schedules,” explains Weeks. “As learning content is reimagined to suit the growing needs of hybrid-learning environments, we need to convince educators of the efficacy of repackaging their well-crafted hour long lectures (for example) into 6-minute chunks of video content.”

Luckily, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. The vast majority of Boclips’ videos are in and around the magical 6-minute mark that maximizes student engagement and avoids cognitive overload.

“This means that including well-produced, high-quality videos in your course has no barrier to entry,” Weeks says. “And also makes it a much easier sell to educators. Who doesn’t want to see their learning content supported by well-made professional video resources?

“Video content can be perfectly suited to engaged, active learning. Whether through post-video follow-up activities or the interactive quizzes, assignments, and questions that often follow videos, video is ideally suited to fill the gap created by the upheaval to traditional learning environments caused by recent events.”

By replacing traditional methods of production with Blackbird across distributed and remote production, Boclips’ team can transform their production cycles. The Blackbird technology and architecture enables genuine collaborative cloud native video editing to reduce content delivery lead times and boost productivity.