News

Update — 5/19/25: The upgrade to the v7 Player has been completed

Please see our KB article, “What's new in the Kaltura v7 player?”. If you encounter any issues with Kaltura media players, please email kalturahelp@berkeley.edu

Modules, module items, pages, and ungraded discussions can now be assigned to everyone, specific sections, or individual students in bCourses. These updates are intended to improve the ability to differentiate instruction of their course content.

What’s new: 

UPDATE -  AUGUST 29, 2024: Based on user feedback, the vendor has rolled back the “Assign To…” tray interface described below, reverting to the original design for assigning due dates and assignees. 

As of July 20, all users will see a new interface when interacting with Discussions or Announcements in bCourses. The updated interfaces include a modernized look and some added features. No functionality has been removed.

Between June 19 and June 27, 2024, did you do an import of bCourses content (e.g. from a previous course) that contained Kaltura media ? If so, the embeds may not function in the imported content due to a Canvas bug, if you used the “Select specific content” option (instead of the alternative "All content"):

The story so far

Have you ever wished that you could automatically send a message to students as soon as they enroll in your course? The bCourses Welcome Email feature is designed to do exactly this! While you can send an announcement at any time, students who enroll later might miss it. The Welcome Email is designed to solve this problem.

In preparation for the Spring 2024 term, we will be making an updated Zoom-bCourses integration available to all instructors. The newer integration is actively supported by Zoom and receives regular feature improvements. Read about the new features

Please note: the change that this article describes has been rolled back as of 11/26/23. The current behavior is that Zoom alternative hosts do NOT become Kaltura co-hosts or co-collaborators. 

An update to the Zoom to Kaltura integration made by Kaltura in early October benefits many Zoom users who have wanted colleagues (co-instructors, GSI’s,staff, etc) to be able to manage the recording files copied to Kaltura via the integration. 

We are happy to announce a new batch of features and fixes for the SuiteC collaboration tools:

SuiteC Fall 21 Update

When we re-built the SuiteC tools earlier this year, we prioritized the popular Asset Library and Engagement Index tools and made the decision to retire the native whiteboard tool and support use of the many available third party whiteboard tools. Our first major update to SuiteC includes a number of ways to make it easier to bring these external whiteboards into the Asset Library.

The Asset Library and Engagement Index tools are being rebuilt, and new versions will be available in the fall, while Whiteboards and Impact Studio are being retired.

Background:

The SuiteC tool set was developed as part of a grant-funded project and first piloted in 2015. Over time, technologies have modernized, class sizes have increased, and the performance of SuiteC has fallen behind, ultimately leading to the need to retire the current toolset.

In-between Spring and Summer instruction, we will upgrade the Turnitin academic integrity integration available inside bCourses: On May 23rd, we will enable a new Turnitin integration, and turn off the legacy integration. 

Turnitin Similarity Reports generated before 5/23/21 will no longer be accessible by instructors in bCourses after that date.

Starting January 6, 2021, at 8 am, whenever any campus member uses their UC Berkeley Zoom account to host a meeting that is recorded to the Zoom Cloud, the resulting recording will be automatically copied to UC Berkeley’s campus video management system, Kaltura. One of two things will happen:

• If the Zoom account owner has no Kaltura account, the recording will be deleted from Kaltura within 24 hours (this does not affect the Zoom Cloud recording, which will still be available in Zoom for 30 days). It will never be shared with anybody else.

About

This document is intended to help instructors design online quizzes in bCourses that minimize the opportunity for academic integrity violations.

The quiz tools in bCourses, Gradescope, and other platforms may make it easier to replace a few high-stakes assessments with more, lower-stakes assessments, lowering the incentive for students to cheat on a few, high-stakes instances.

Updated Zoom Integration to be Released August 15th, 2020

As many Fall 2020 courses will utilize synchronous online instruction via the Zoom video conferencing platform, we are happy to announce the availability of a new Zoom integration for bCourses, which will be enabled on August 15th. This new integration will replace the existing integration, which will be removed at the same time.