We learn via an email from BCNet that the online video company MediaCore has been acquired (by Workday, who seem to be quite the behemoth in the making) and the platform is shutting down. As a result BCNet’s “MSO with MediaCore will no longer be operational.”

Bummer. MediaCore looked like a promising option. Particularly because there are administrators in our province who believe that using YouTube is an egregious violation of student rights. Lucky for us, we had not been able to move quickly to implement MediaCore at TRU. Other institutions in the province are not so fortunate. I guess we’ll go back to pretending that online video does not exist.

This episode is a reminder that favouring vendors does not always deliver the reliability that many decision-makers seem to presume. Too bad that public higher education in BC has been steadily reducing its capacity to support open source options over the past decade.

On that note, I would like to thank BCNet for killing the open education working group last month without warning or viable explanation. That gratitude is sincere.