In June 2022 I gave a presentation at the Tag der Lehre at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln on video-supported teaching with educast.nrw. Presenting something to colleagues who already use ILIAS every day and are broadly skeptical of yet another platform is a useful discipline. You have to answer the obvious question fast: why should we care about this, when YouTube works fine?

The short answer is that YouTube does not work fine, for reasons that matter specifically to universities. The longer answer is what this post is about.

What Is Wrong with YouTube

YouTube is the world’s dominant video platform. It is free to use, globally available, handles any file size, transcodes automatically, and comes with an audience of two billion logged-in users. For individual creators who want reach, it is genuinely hard to beat.

For universities it fails in at least three important ways.

Data protection. When you upload a lecture or a concert recording to YouTube, the content, the metadata, and the viewing behaviour of your students go to Google’s servers — which are predominantly in the United States. Under the GDPR, transferring personal data to third countries requires either an adequacy decision, standard contractual clauses with additional safeguards, or explicit informed consent. After the Schrems II ruling (Court of Justice of the EU, 2020), the adequacy of US-based data transfers became legally contested in a way that makes institutional YouTube use genuinely difficult for European universities. Using it for anything with identifiable students — which includes most teaching content — is a compliance problem.

Platform logic. YouTube is designed to maximise watch time. Its recommendation algorithm is not neutral. It will recommend whatever comes after your lecture, and what comes after your lecture is not under your control. For educational content — especially sensitive material, or content that should remain in a defined pedagogical context — this is a real problem. The platform is not indifferent to what is hosted on it; it shapes how it is consumed.

Institutional fragility. YouTube is free until it isn’t. Platform terms change; monetisation policies change; content is demonetised or removed based on automated systems with imperfect appeal mechanisms. Building institutional infrastructure on a free commercial service is a bet that the commercial incentives of that service will remain aligned with your needs. That bet has a poor historical record.

None of this means that individual instructors should never use YouTube. It means that universities should not make YouTube their default institutional solution.

educast.nrw: A Cooperative Model

educast.nrw is a project of the Digitale Hochschule NRW — a cooperative of North Rhine-Westphalian universities building shared digital infrastructure. The concept is a state-wide video service, run by universities for universities, for the recording, processing, management, and distribution of video content in teaching and research. The platforms calls itself “Hochschul-YouTube”, which is both accurate and slightly underselling what makes it different.

The HfMT Köln participates as a user institution, which is where I come in as the IT contact for setting it up on our end.

The technical foundation is Opencast, an open-source video management system developed by a consortium of universities. This matters: the software is auditable, the development direction is set by the institutions that use it rather than by advertising revenue, and the infrastructure runs on German servers that are explicitly GDPR-compliant. Licenses on uploaded content are freely choosable — CC-BY-SA is an option, which means the university’s teaching materials can be open access if that is what the instructor wants.

What It Can Do

The feature set covers the actual use cases of a university, not the use cases of a content creator trying to build a following.

Recording. The Opencast Studio browser app records in three modes: screen only, camera only, or screen and camera simultaneously as a synchronised multi-stream. That last option — Presentation and Presenter as separate streams, played back with the viewer switching focus between them, or as picture-in-picture — is the format that works for a lecture. You get the slides and the speaker in the same video, but the viewer can choose which to focus on. That flexibility is not something you get from a simple screen recording uploaded to YouTube.

Multi-perspective video. For a music university this is the feature that changes things. A concert or a masterclass is not well-served by a single camera angle. The platform supports simultaneous recording from two camera perspectives — a wide shot and a detail shot, say, or a front view and a hands view for a piano performance. The viewer can switch between them in playback, or the institution can set a default presentation. This is infrastructure that makes the teaching use of concert recordings actually feasible, not just technically possible.

Formats. Video up to 4K with adaptive bitrate streaming (the player adjusts automatically to the viewer’s connection), audio up to broadcast quality (48kHz/16-bit, exceeding CD’s 44.1kHz), with FLAC at up to 96kHz/24-bit in development. No file size limit. These specifications matter for music. A piano recording compressed to whatever YouTube decides to do with it is not the same as an uncompromised audio stream. The difference is audible.

ILIAS integration. This is the practical hinge. Video that lives in a separate platform is video that students may or may not find. Video embedded directly in the ILIAS course page, in the learning module, at the point in the curriculum where it is relevant — that is video that is part of the course rather than adjacent to it. The integration between educast.nrw and ILIAS is direct: upload to the video platform, embed in ILIAS on pages, in learning modules, or as standalone video objects, all from within ILIAS.

Access rights. The granularity here is what distinguishes it from any public platform. Each video can be set to: public (anyone on the internet), institution-wide (anyone logged in at the university), course-wide (only enrolled students in a specific course), individual (specific named people), or private (only the uploader). A graduation concert might be public. A practice session for student feedback might be course-only. A recording made for an individual student’s reflection might be shared only with that student and their teacher. These are all normal use cases in a music university; they all require different settings; the platform handles all of them.

Use Cases in a Music University

The general university use case — lecture recording, video tutorial, self-study module — applies at HfMT as much as anywhere. But a music and dance university has some specific ones.

Concert recordings. HfMT Köln runs performances at both its Cologne and Wuppertal sites. Recording these and making them available to students, faculty, and selectively to the public used to mean someone had to manage files, find hosting, deal with YouTube’s automated copyright detection flagging student performances of copyrighted repertoire, and explain to students why their graduation concert had been muted by an algorithm. The controlled platform makes all of this manageable.

Stage presence as a reflective tool. Watching yourself perform is a standard part of performance training. It is uncomfortable, useful, and until recently required either dedicated recording equipment or the ad-hoc use of a phone propped against something. A proper recording infrastructure with controlled access — the student sees the video, their teacher sees the video, nobody else does — changes the pedagogical viability of this approach. The barrier to actually using video feedback in practice teaching drops substantially.

Theory and practice. This is the institutional argument I made in the presentation and stand by: video infrastructure that works for a lecture also works for a concert. The same system that stores the introduction to music theory also stores the masterclass by a visiting artist. This is not incidental — it is the point of a shared infrastructure. You do not need to choose a platform for academic content and a different one for performance content. The platform works for both.

The Argument Behind the Argument

There is a broader principle at work here that extends beyond video platforms. Public universities are funded by public money. The infrastructure they build with that money — software, platforms, data, content — should be under their control, governed by their values, and ideally available to other public institutions. The commercial platform model inverts this: you get free hosting in exchange for your data, your students’ attention, and your institutional dependence.

educast.nrw is an example of what the alternative looks like in practice: a cooperative of public institutions building shared infrastructure on open-source software, governed collectively, with data on European servers under European law. It is not perfect — the setup overhead is real, the user experience does not match YouTube’s, and the feature roadmap (automatic subtitling, H5P support, livestreaming, annotation tools) is still catching up to what commercial platforms have had for years. But the model is right.

The question of who owns the video infrastructure of a university is the same question as who owns its email, its learning management system, its student data. The answer should be: the university, operating under law, answerable to its students and to the public that funds it.

The slides from the Tag der Lehre 2022 presentation are available on request. For educast.nrw setup at HfMT Köln, contact the IT department.

Changelog

  • 2025-08-18: Corrected the capitalisation of “OpenCast” to “Opencast” throughout (matching the project’s official spelling on opencast.org).