Site announcements

Update!

We're continuing to move our video content into the platform throughout the week. In the interest of transparency (and sharing the nerdy bits with those of you who are interested in such things) here is where we've landed.

What we were requiring in a video host, in order of priority:

1. Ease of use for students, including features like adjustable playback speed, closed captioning, and interactivity.
2. Ease of use for me/other instructors and experts, to reduce the amount of friction slowing down my production of content for you.
3. Speed and reliability. Some minor downtime would be acceptable if the above were handled.
4. Affordability. We don't want our video hosting requirements to add to the cost of participating in Solo School in any meaningful way.
5. Canadian data hosting, keeping the data in Canada, giving additional privacy and protections to students.
6. Canadian company, contributing to Canada's tech sector financially, ideally a small to medium business rather than a massive corporation.

Basically, we wanted more control over our video recordings, but not at the expense of your experience.

We have landed on using Loom as our video hosting provider. This is why:

• Self-hosting the video on our Canadian VPS, while ideal from a data privacy perspective, is prohibitively expensive while also being laggy and difficult to manage, and it requires a third-party video player or the Moodle built-in video player (and all of those also lack the features we need.)
• There are a limited number of Canadian companies that offer video-specific hosting, which is required in order to have a built-in video player and handle the bandwidth requirements of multiple students streaming videos simultaneously.
• The video recordings we are hosting here are workshop and lecture recordings, which do not tend to contain students' personal information. Therefore there is a greater level of acceptable risk, because the risk is to our IP and not your personal information.
• Loom provides multiple fantastic features for neurodivergent folks, including automatic Closed Captioning, variable playback speed, reactions, and showing how long the "sped up" video will take to finish (aka seeing what done looks like.)

This also allows me to record new course content on the fly with just a few clicks and upload instantaneously, embed with a simple copy/paste into this platform, and host an unlimited number of unlimited-length videos with no restrictions.

If you're curious about Loom's privacy statements, you can view those here. If you'd like to know more about their security measures, you can view that here.

If you can't tell yet, I'm committed to transparency in how your data is handled going forward and we're working hard behind the scenes to prepare both privacy and security policies (technical, long, detailed, legally binding) and privacy and security statements (plain language descriptions of where things are, the rationale behind those decisions, and ways to ask questions.)

So. This is where we've landed! If these behind-the-scenes tech updates are helpful, I'm happy to continue them in this thread. If you want to continue receiving them, subscribe to this discussion! If you don't want to continue receiving tech updates, you can unsubscribe from this specific discussion while still getting notified of other important updates in this space.