What’s New in MEDIAL Version 10: Smarter Search and Global Reach
Great educational video should be easy to find, easy to navigate, and easy to understand. As video libraries grow, those essentials become even more important. A student revising for an exam might need one explanation from a long lecture, not the entire recording. Another learner might find the right material but need captions or audio in a different language.
MEDIAL Version 10 brings those needs together. With AI Video Moments, Natural Language AI Search, Multi-Language Captions, and Multiple Audio Tracks, we’re making video content more discoverable and giving learners more choice in how they access it.
The exciting part is how these features connect. Finding the right video is only the beginning. Getting straight to the relevant explanation, then accessing it in a language that works for you, makes that content much more useful.
Table of Contents
AI Video Moments: Make Long-Form Content More Manageable
Educators are producing more video content than ever, and much of it is long-form. That content contains valuable explanations, demonstrations, and guidance. The challenge is helping learners locate those useful sections without searching through an entire recording.
Consider a student preparing for an exam who is unsure about one particular concept. They may remember that it was covered in a lecture, but not exactly where. AI Video Moments provides a more direct route to that explanation.
We’ve integrated technology that analyses videos uploaded to MEDIAL and identifies relevant moments. Each moment includes a title, description, and time references, giving learners a clear way to explore what the recording contains.
How to Request Video Moments
The manual workflow starts in the MEDIAL upload wizard:
Open the Associated Files tab.
Select Request Video Moments.
The video is sent for AI analysis to identify relevant sections.
The generated moments appear in the MEDIAL interface and become searchable.
On the media playback page, learners can browse those moments and select one to jump directly to the relevant part of the video. The original recording remains the source, but its key sections are much easier to access.
In our example, a webinar about the Moodle video plugin generated 13 individual moments. Rather than relying only on the overall webinar title, learners could explore the specific topics within it and go straight to the section they needed.
This is the practical value of discoverability: making the knowledge inside a recording easier to locate. Our related article on AI-powered educational video moments and discoverability explores that approach in more depth.
Manual Requests or Automatic Creation
AI Video Moments is an add-on feature, with permissions managed in a similar way to existing caption permissions. Institutions can allow specific users or groups to request moments manually, or configure automatic moment creation.
For example, an institution could choose to generate moments automatically for instructor-created content. That makes discoverability part of the content workflow rather than another task for every teacher to remember.
There is also a planned evolution: adding a quiz question at the end of each moment to check understanding. The intention is to use those responses to help refine the model. This is future development, not a current capability presented as part of the Version 10 moments workflow.
Natural Language AI Search: Ask for the Explanation You Need
Moments help learners navigate a recording. But what happens when they don’t know which recording contains the answer?
That’s where Natural Language AI Search comes in. Students can describe what they need in everyday language, including context about who they are and what they are trying to understand. They don’t have to reduce their question to a few keywords.
MEDIAL searches the media indexed through the moments process and returns relevant moments related to that request. A detailed question can lead to an individual section within a video, rather than simply a broad result for the whole recording.
The distinction is important:
- AI Video Moments
helps learners explore the useful sections within a video.
- Natural Language AI Search
helps learners find relevant moments across indexed media when they don’t know where to start.
Together, these features reduce the distance between a question and the recorded explanation. For revision or revisiting a difficult topic, that is a much more focused way to use an educational video library.
Multi-Language Captions: Switch Languages in One Click
Finding the right explanation is one challenge. Understanding it comfortably is another. Multi-Language Captions expands the reach of a recording by allowing learners to select from the caption languages available for that video.
The experience is straightforward. Open the captions control, choose a language, and the caption track switches. In our demonstration, the same video moved from English captions to Spanish captions with a single selection.
Learners can change caption languages during playback without pausing or restarting. That keeps the interaction simple and lets them continue from the same point in the recording.
A video can support up to 10 caption languages. Once the feature is activated globally, instructors can enable it per video when needed. It is not a case of every video automatically having every language available.
That distinction gives institutions and instructors flexibility. They can provide language options for the recordings that need them, while learners choose from the tracks available in the player. Language support becomes part of the learning experience rather than an awkward extra step.
Multiple Audio Tracks: Choose the Spoken Language Too
Captions provide one way to access content in another language. Multiple Audio Tracks adds another: alternative spoken-language tracks within the same video.
In our demonstration, an instructional video about grading a video assignment in Moodle played first in English, then switched to Spanish audio. The video itself stayed the same; the selected audio track changed.
To select an available track:
Open the player’s settings cog.
Choose the
Audio Tracks option, identified by the headphones icon.
Select the language you want to hear.
Audio tracks can be changed while the video is playing, with playback automatically switching to the selected track. The demonstration used two languages, but videos can offer additional language tracks as needed.
Captions and audio give learners different ways to access the same material. Someone may prefer translated text alongside the original narration, while another learner may prefer spoken audio in their own language. Version 10 brings both choices into the player.
A More Connected Educational Video Experience
The four features in MEDIAL Version 10 address a connected set of needs: locating content, navigating it, and understanding it.
AI Video Moments gives long recordings clearer entry points. Natural Language AI Search lets learners describe what they need and find relevant indexed moments. Multi-Language Captions and Multiple Audio Tracks then help them access that material in a suitable language.
These additions sit within the broader MEDIAL video platform, extending how educational content can be discovered and used.
The goal is simple: make valuable video easier to use. Whether a learner is revisiting one concept or accessing course material in another language, Version 10 gives them a more direct path to the explanation they need.
Want to learn more? Book a free demo to see MEDIAL in action.
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