Totara Learn Open Discussions

Managing lots of larger courses?

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Dear Colleagues

We have a new client who is creating a lot of their own courses (500 or so in the last few months). As some of these include video and audio, they can rapidly become quite large.

I'm looking to see what others do in similar circumstances.

Do you externally host large courses - or do you just host them all within Totara? If so do you encounter any limitations with how many (or how large in total) courses can be stored on the same server and hard disk as a Totara V12 Learn installation - or have you just increased the size of the hard disk to allow for more and larger courses?

Thank you all :-)

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Hi Lee,

In my experience, it is not a good option to self-host video - 10 Reasons Why You Should Never Host Your Own Videos (wp101.com)

Youtube is a great (free) option for videos that could be public (or you don't mind keeping them unlisted and embedding them where you need them).

We store videos on Vimeo (paid) and embed them in the Totara course page, book, pages, and lessons modules and also in SCORM packages.

You can also store audio files on Vimeo/YouTube - i.e. rather than uploading .mp3 audio files; add a simple background image and convert the files first to .mp4

Here is a comparison: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/youtube-vs-vimeo

Hope that helps!

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Thanks so much Vijay - that's very helpful.

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Hi Lee,

We're using YouTube currently to store large video files. We keep them unlisted and only share the link via our LMS.

Cost was the main factor with us going with YouTube. But our decision was also determined by the platform ability to meet privacy, analytics, ease of use and accessibility needs.

We also considered Vimeo, but the cost ruled it out. Vijay's comparison link is very good at listing the pros and cons between the two.

We're getting SharePoint so we might look at using that. But we'll have a closer look once we get it so we can compare it to YouTube.

Thanks,

Larry

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Thanks as always for your input Larry. As it happens we are investigating SharePoint as a way of hosting large files for a different client, so it will be interesting to see how the hosting/licencing works out, and whether the SharePoint licencing makes it a practical option. I will report back.

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