Hi, I’m Thijs van der Vossen of Fingertips.
Fingertips is a small design and development team from Amsterdam.
We build new products, and help make existing projects better.
SWITCHtube is an academic video platform we designed and developed for SWITCH,
the Swiss National Research and Education Network.
SWITCHtube is being used by students, educators, and researchers at universities and higher education institutions in Switzerland.
In this video, I’ll give an overview of some of the features of SWITCHtube and explain our design thinking as it applies to the platform.
SWITCHtube was built to comply with strict privacy and security standards.
All video, as well as any other data is stored on servers running within a controlled infrastructure.
No data is processed by external services.
Everything is always encrypted in-transit,
there’s no user tracking of any kind,
and the platform is obviously entirely ad-free.
SWITCHtube’s user interface is fully responsive.
It has been designed to adjust to the display of the device you’re currently using and to support its conventions.
It provides a unified user experience that makes all its features available in every browser,
Both on the desktop as well as on all mobile devices.
For example, you can simply record, upload, and publish video directly from your mobile phone or tablet.
We not only wanted to make it easy to browse, search for, and watch video,
we also felt a need to make it as straightforward as possible for anyone to publish or share video on SWITCHtube.
Help is provided inline where needed,
fully integrated with the user experience,
so that all features can be used by anyone…
…regardless of their experience with digital media or their level of technical expertise.
For example,
step-by-step guidance and clear information…
…can help prevent mistakes when privacy-sensitive material needs to be shared confidentially.
On a less serious note,
a friendly UI makes it easier for people to start using more advanced features…
…such as the ability to offer subtitles with their video.
Looking at the number of support requests after more than 5 years of usage,
we may confidently conclude that we succeeded in this regard.
Now let’s take a closer look at how SWITCHtube is structured.
SWITCHtube is divided into participating organizations.
Channels are created within organizations by their users,
and video is added to these channels.
There’s a global homepage where the participating organizations are listed…
…and from where you can search across all their content available to you.
You can also go to “Open Channels” which lists publicly available teaching, learning, and research videos that can be freely used.
When you select an organization, you’re taken to this organization’s homepage which lists their popular and recently added videos.
From this page onwards, selecting “Channels” or “Search” show channels and video from the current organization by default.
In the same way,
all channel overviews and video pages are always shown within the context of their organization…
…as indicated by the organization name shown in the top-left corner.
You can always return to the global homepage using the bottom-right “Home” link found in the footer of every page.
This structure gives each organization their own homepage,
keeps it clear which organization a channel, video, or user profile belongs to,
but still makes it easy to browse and search all available channels and video, and allows for effortless cross-organization collaboration.
SWITCHtube uses its own player with all the common controls you’d expect,
such as Play/Pause, scrubbing, time played and time remaining, mute, fullscreen, and subtitle selection.
Streaming to a TV or wireless display is also supported.
Playback and scrubbing can also be controlled using the keyboard.
Video can be embedded into other webpages, or shared as a web address.
The current playback position can optionally be included, which makes the video start playback there.
A channel owner can also decide to allow videos in their channel to be downloaded.
Documents and other files can be attached to a video.
This allows background reading, exercises, assignments, or other related files to be listed below the video for the viewer to download and use.
Last year, we added a comments feature based on user requests.
This feature is optional and can be enabled by the channel owner for all videos in their channel.
Comments can be marked up using a rich text editor which also allows linking to specific playback positions on the video timeline.
Among other things, comments are being used for the review of assignments and to facilitate feedback on practical exercises and internship sessions.
This has been very effective with video recorded as part of educational and healthcare training curricula,
and has also been used in courses intended to improve management, collaboration, and presentation skills.
We’re currently working on further extending the comments for academic use,
for example by adding support for handing in assignment by students,
and with features for structured assessment and rating by professors and lecturers.
Let’s look at how you’d publish video on SWITCHtube.
Under “Channels” you’ll find a list of the channels in your organization you can watch video in,
all channels you can contribute to, and finally the channels you own.
Here you can also create a new channel.
A channel consists of a title, an optional description, and various settings:
You can designate your channel as an “Open Channel”.
Open channels contain publicly available teaching, learning, and research videos.
You can enable comments.
You can allow video to be downloaded.
You can allow access from an external player.
This enables video to be included as external resources in your Learning Management System,
or to be part of reusable interactive content.
Finally, you can make SWITCHtube keep a copy of the video files originally uploaded.
After you’ve created your channel, all users in your organization will be able to browse and view video you uploaded to it.
You can change this view permission level on the “Manage permissions” page.
Here you can choose to allow your channel and the video in it to be viewed by:
Everyone; this makes video publicly available.
Anyone with a link; this also makes video publicly available, but the channel and its videos will be hidden from search results and overview lists.
This can be useful if you want to embed your video on another website or use it in a Learning Management System without having it listed on SWITCHtube.
You can make video only available for users who’ve signed in…
…or you can decide to limit access to users within your organization only. This is the default for new channels.
Finally, you can decide to share video with a small group of people you specifically added to your channel.
This is what you’d use to safely share privacy-sensitive or confidential video.
You can find users who already have a SWITCHtube profile by entering their name, or you can enter their email address to send out an invitation.
Once you’ve added a collaborator, you can change their permission level if you want them to be able to also add video to your channel,
or if you want them to help you manage your channel.
Instead of adding collaborators one-by-one, you can also copy-paste a list of email addresses.
This is often used when groups of students have to collaborate on a project.
Please note that channel collaborators can be used with any of the view permission levels.
Let’s now upload a video to our channel.
SWITCHtube supports a wide range of video formats and will convert your video to a number of different formats and quality levels…
…so that it can be played back on a wide range of devices under almost all network conditions.
Processing starts immediately in the background once the video file has uploaded.
In the meantime, you can add a title, an episode identifier, a description, choose a license, and set the publication status.
The episode identifier makes it easy to control the order in which videos are listed without having to prefix the video title.
This is convenient for any kind of serialized content, and works especially well with lecture recordings.
You can also choose to add video information later.
Once the video is done processing, you can choose which still frame you want SWITCHtube to use as its thumbnail in overview lists…
…and as a poster frame on the video page.
Let’s add subtitles to our video.
First set the language, then choose between adding subtitles or closed captions.
The difference is clearly explained below each option.
We designed this subtitle editor to allow you to enter cues while the video is playing.
You can use the keyboard shortcuts listed in the sidebar to control video playback while typing…
…so that you don’t have to take your hands off the keyboard.
You can also reduce the playback speed of the video to make it easier to keep up.
When you’re done entering subtitles,
you can switch from the “Write” tab to the “Edit” tab to fix mistakes and to adjust the timing.
Save your subtitles and publish them to make them available for your viewers.
You can also import subtitles created using other tools.
SWITCHtube supports the popular SubRip and WebVTT formats.
Subtitles can be exported as WebVTT files.
Once a video has subtitles available, a player control will appear that allows the viewer to choose from the available subtitles and closed captions.
SWITCHtube keeps a history of all changes made to a channel and its videos.
This can be helpful to see what was done by whom when you’re collaborating on a channel with others,
or to revert changes made by mistake.
The event history is only available to channel owners.
We didn’t go into some of its more advanced features such as integration with automated lecture recording,
the way microformats are used to make metadata machine-readable,
accessibility and internationalization,
and the administration and management tools it provides for participating organizations.
If you’d like to know more, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at Fingertips.
Thanks for watching.