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A current awareness resource for students & faculty members in Business & Economics


Films on Demand: Streaming video for SFU courses

Published by Mark Bodnar

Happy Monday, all — and Happy "First Day of Classes!"

In our current remote-only world, many instructors and students are looking for streaming videos to liven up classes. With that in mind, the SFU Library has started a short-term subscription to a collection of over 34,000 videos in all subject areas: the Films on Demand: Master Academic Collection.

Logo of the Films on Demand streaming video collection.

We currently only have access to this resource until Dec. 31, 2020. If you do use it in classes, I'd appreciate hearing any feedback you have: mbodnar@sfu.ca. 
 
UPDATE (Jan. 2, 2021): Our access has been extended to Dec. 31, 2021!

 Here are a few examples of videos from the collection that seem relevant to Business & Economics: 

If you want to provide links to such videos in your courses, you have a few options: 

(a) The titles of individual films/videos are listed in our library catalogue, with direct links to each item in the database. You could direct your students to specific titles by giving them the "permalink" from the relevant catalogue record. See the links above for examples.

(b) Within the database itself, each film has a direct URL that includes our library's proxy server settings in it. You can email such links to students or post them in Canvas and your students will be required to authenticate as current SFU researchers before being redirected to the video.

For example, this link -- https://fod-infobase-com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/p_ViewVideo.aspx?xtid=203358 — would take you through our authentication system and straight to a video about "Disaster Capitalism."

(c) If you only want students to watch selected segments of a video, you could click on that segment title (to the right of the video image), then click on "Share" below the image, then click on the Link tab, and copy the URL that shows up and provide it to students.

As with the link in (b) above, it will have our proxy server information embedded in it, but this time it will take people through our SFU authentication and directly to that segment.  See, for instance, this link

(d) Finally, if you click on the "segments" link that is below the video image (the one with scissors next to it), you can create a link to a custom segment by providing the start/end times for the portion that you want students to watch. This extra feature of the database requires that you create your own (free) user account on the FoD site. See this Help page for details: Creating and Saving Custom Video Segments

Need more streaming video options? Many Business/Economics instructors find LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com) to be useful. And if your class is about complex research methods, then Sage Research Methods. Video might be useful.  See also Criterion on Demand for "Educationally relevant feature films and some documentaries for the Canadian Post Secondary Market." 

May your Summer 2020 courses go smoothly!

-- Mark
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Mark Bodnar
mbodnar@sfu.ca
Business & Economics Librarian

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