Mediathread

Mediathread is a multimedia analysis environment developed at the Center for Teaching and Learning. Since its debut in Fall 2010, Mediathread has helped learners to closely study multimedia objects from across the web. It is now used in a variety of courses at Columbia University to study history, film, languages, music, social sciences, cognition, journalism, education, and many other subjects. Its code is open source, and it is also used at a number of other universities.

Mediathread allows instructors to set up course-specific sites, in which students collect videos, audio files, and images from sites across the web, such as YouTube, Flickr, and library databases. Students can then clip, tag, and annotate collected media in direct response to instructor assignments, organize and share media selections in their personal collections, and embed media selections into multimedia essays and discussions. Mediathread is integrated with CourseWorks.

The wide range of courses using this platform and close partnerships with faculty incorporating it into teaching and scholarship continue to spur ongoing development of Mediathread’s features. In February 2022, the platform’s existing set of supported media was expanded to include a PDF selection feature. This new addition allows users to highlight portions of PDF documents, and use these selections in Mediathread assignments and discussions.