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6 Things You Should Know About Media Manager

1. What is it?

Media Manager is a web-based tool that helps Ohio State University faculty, staff, and students collect, tag, organize, and securely share their digital files for teaching and learning. Media Manager makes it easy to:

  • Share digital files on the web quickly without programming-everything from data sets to digital images, video clips to 3D animations, and more
  • Password protect those digital files and share them with students, colleagues, and partners around the world
  • Re-use the same digital files in different contexts-website, PowerPoint, off-line slide show, zip archive, and so on

Media Manager also provides a range of privacy settings, giving users considerable control over how their media can be used and shared with people on and off campus. It is easy to share assets with specific courses, as well, because Media Manager draws course information from SIS to facilitate privacy settings.

2. Who's doing it?

The Arts and Sciences Technology Services Office is responsible for Media Manager. All Ohio State faculty, staff, and students can access Media Manager. More than 900 people have created 2,850 collections with more than 77,500 items focused around teaching, learning, research, and administration. Some unit-wide use cases include Psychology, Veterinary Medicine, Byrd Polar Research Center, Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum, and the Office of the Chief Information Officer.

Media Manager differs from other web-based media collection tools in the following ways:

  • Security/Sharing/Permissions
    • Media Manager Group site owners and collection managers have the ability to enable/disable access to their collections as they see fit. Media Manager puts this power in the hands of the Group site owners and collection managers. Group site owners and collection managers can define view, export, and manage rights at individual, group, course, institutional, or public levels without managing user logins and passwords. Accounts are integrated with the university's authentication standard, Shibboleth, and guests are required to provide individual log-in credentials.
    • Drawing information from SIS, as well as from customized groups, it is easy to select privacy settings for OSU users and guests. Sharing with a class requires minimal effort and access will dynamically adjust as students add and drop from the course.
  • High Resolution Images
    • Unlike many other online options, Media Manager can store and share many formats of high-resolution images.
  • Multiple Types of Files
    • Media Manager was designed to accept just about any file type.
  • Customizable Cataloging
    • Media Manager Group site owners and collection managers can define their site's metadata structure (descriptive information associated with collections and files) and choose which fields are searchable, which fields are required or optional, and who can view them.
  • Ease of Use

Media Manager was built specifically to make managing media simple for faculty, staff, and graduate students.

3. How does it work?

Anyone can access a Media Manager for Group site; however, permissions are required to create, manage, share, export or view collections. To inquire about a Media Manager for Groups site, visit https://mediamanager.osu.edu and select the "Can I set up a project or group site?" link.

All OSU faculty, staff, and students can access Media Manager (an account is not required).

Media Manager provides an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page with how-to tips and tutorials at https://mediamanager.osu.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=site.faq. Customized workshops and consultation support are also available and may be requested from the Contact Us tab at https://mediamanager.osu.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=site.contact.

4. Why is it significant?

Media Manager for Groups will continue to gain popularity as it moves toward better integration with other centrally supported products, such as the learning management system, wiki, and streaming services. Further, requests for secure and university-owned media storage options will only increase, and Media Manager may be in a position to meet some of that need. In the spirit of Web 2.0, positioning Media Manager as a necessary part of creating mash-ups or digital narratives could see its use increase further. Media Manager likely will experience continual growth, supported by a distributed support network throughout campus.

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    • Media Manager is not intended to archive work and requires collection expiration dates set by the collection owner(s)/manager(s).
    • Media cannot be edited like a wiki space. In order for a group of individuals to edit a document, individuals would be required to download the file, edit it on a personal computer, and upload it to replace the existing file. This makes it difficult to collaborate on a single document.
    • Media Manager lacks Web 2.0 interface options such as RSS feeds or a built-in social media bar.

    • 5. What are the downsides?

    6. Where is it going?

    Media Manager for Groups offers a platform for faculty, staff, and students to organize digital assets and implement them as a significant teaching tool. Several Media Manager presentation and export options provide opportunities to enhance student engagement and afford anytime/anyplace learning and feedback. Media Manager fosters creative assignment possibilities that could inspire interesting collaborative and reflective learning opportunities.