CUNY Academic Commons

Hi Boone,

I thought I replied to you. But I guess I replied in the wrong place.

I went onto lynda.com website and it says it connects with Embed.ly and can embed once embed.ly works. Here is the link: http://embed.ly/provider/lynda. But Embed.ly is a subscription service and I am not sure if it works with Wordpress. NO widget yet to embed lynda.com to wordpress. Could you please take a look?

Thanks.
Rowena

Thanks for the details, Rowena!

I've experimented with this a bit. There's a WordPress plugin for Embedly, which allows some usage without having a paid Embedly account. But it appears that Lynda (or Embedly) limit the way that videos can be watched without being logged in. Specifically: As a user logged into Lynda, I was able to view as many embedded videos as I wanted. When I logged out of Lynda, I was able to view only a single video from Lynda; subsequent videos simply failed to load (with no feedback or error message from the Embedly player). So, while I can't find documentation of this fact, my suspicion is that Lynda will allow anonymous users to watch a single video as a sort of sampler, but won't allow any more than that.

I'm afraid I don't understand Embedly's role in this - their documentation is not clear to me. It could be that signing up for one of Embedly's paid plans will give all visitors access to Lynda content http://embed.ly/pricing. I'd be surprised if this were possible on the $9 plan; it might be available on the $99 plan, but I don't really understand how Embedly's feature set breaks down.

Because of the proprietary nature of the content, I'm unsure that this is a good option for classroom use, or for the Commons. Rowena, what do you think?

Reading this again, I'm recalling your original point that QC has a lynda.com account of some sort. Depending on how this account works, it could work around some of the problems described above. If you want, I can add the Embedly plugin to the next release and you can play with it in the actual Commons environment, to see if it'll be workable for QC students. (I'm assuming that visits to Lynda are whitelisted from QC IP addresses?)

Yes. QC has paid for lynda.com and we now have lynda.qc.cuny.edu account for all faculty, staff and students. So login to lynda.com to watch the full video is not a problem. It would be great if we add Embedly plugin to have a try. Thanks.

Rowena

Thank you so much, Boone. I will let you know.

Hi Boone,

Just got time today to try embedly with lynda.qc.cuny.edu. It works. Just activated the plugin and pasted the video link on the post. The setup is good - I have to sing on lynda.qc.cuny.edu on another tab and come back to the page to watch the videos. Otherwise, the arrow on the video does not work - protected.

Thanks for downloading this plugin.

Excellent! So glad to hear it works seamlessly. Thanks for following up, Rowena.