Roll forward videos

This page shows you how to use the “Roll Forward” feature of the Video Portal My Videos page.

The Roll Forward tool allows you to select videos you have uploaded to courses in the previous academic year so that they can duplicated by the system automatically and made available to the current academic year of the course.

This prevents the need to manually download and re-upload videos when you wish to re-use them in another year of the course, and ensures that students can view them on the Video Portal.

Important points

  • this tool only allows uploaded videos to be rolled forward – automatic lecture recordings cannot be rolled forward.
  • any videos selected to be rolled forward will be processed overnight, meaning that they will publish the following day.
  • you cannot copy videos to more than one course at a time
  • videos can be rolled forward more than once – so you could copy a video into different courses if required by using the Roll Forward tool multiple times
  • Rolled forward videos will become available to manage in the My Videos manage tab, alongside your other uploads.

Using the Roll Forward tool

On the My Videos page, click the Roll Forward tab and follow the steps below.

  1. Choose a 2020/21 course from the first drop-down box
  2. Wait for a list of all uploaded videos for this course to be displayed
  3. Tick the box next to the videos you want to roll forward (note you can click the title of the video to play it in a new tab,)
  4. Now select the current year course from the next dropdown box
  5. Click Proceed
  6. A confirmation page will be displayed, summarising which videos will be copied to the selected courses. You can edit the titles of the rolled forward videos by editing the text within the text box.
  7. Click Submit to confirm.
  8. If you go to the Manage tab, you will see the selected videos now appear in the list, showing as processing.
  9. After the videos have been processed overnight, their status will show as completed and you will be able to manage them as normal.

Re-using older videos/lecture recordings

If you wish to re-use videos that were recorded by the system automatically (i.e. via lecture capture) then you will need to manually download and re-upload them to the current year course, or else embed them into Blackboard, to make them available to students.

This procedure also applies if you wish to re-use videos which were uploaded before the previous academic year.

Download and re-upload videos

  1. Visit the video page on the Video Portal, ensuring you are logged in and click the Options button under it.
  2. Select download video. If the video plays in the browser rather than downloading, you can right-click on it and choose to save it.
  3. Visit the My Videos upload tab, and complete the form to upload the downloaded video to the current course area.
  4. Once completed, the video will be available to all students on the course

Embed video in current course area

  1. Visit the video page on the Video Portal, ensuring you are logged in and click the Options button under it.
  2. Select ‘video info’ to show the embed code. Highlight and copy it.
  3. In the area of the Blackboard course where you want students to watch the video, embed the copied code into the source area of that section. See this page for further information.
  4. Students will be able to view the video in the Blackboard course, but will not be able to see it directly on the Video Portal unless the video is uploaded to the current area.