Large impact, Local feel
Serving 70,000+ students across 16 colleges, the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) is the state’s largest provider of postsecondary education. For more than two decades it has been Kentucky’s primary source for career and workforce readiness, transfer education, and workforce education, providing affordable and accessible education to more than one million learners.
Moving forward, KCTCS has a simple vision: to be the primary provider of skilled talent to grow Kentucky. “We exist to make higher education accessible,” explains Learning Management System (LMS) Administrator, James Gibson. “We serve students who are working adults and first-generation college goers, and work with rural communities and people who need flexible pathways. What defines us is the scale at which we can operate with a local feel. We've got 16 colleges operating across Kentucky with 73 campuses, each with its own identity and student population, but connected under one system of KCTCS.”
The Challenge
Making Online Courses Accessible and Affordable
For James Gibson and his team, the COVID-19 pandemic emphasized the crucial role that video plays in modern learning. “When a lot of our courses moved online, our faculty needed a way to deliver instruction that felt personal and direct, not just walls of text in a course shell. Video is one of the most natural ways to approximate that presence,” he explains.
KCTCS needed a video solution that supported their mission to provide affordable and accessible education. Gibson’s team experimented with a range of free tools, however found them cumbersome to integrate into courses, difficult to scale, and that the required functionality to make learning inclusive was lacking. “A major issue that we were running into with the options we tried was that ADA accessibility for videos was very much an afterthought,” Gibson says.
The Solution
Integrated video with Blackboard LMS: Video Studio
By adding Video Studio to their Blackboard LMS instance, KCTCS has delivered a more personalized, accessible, and intuitive video experience for their students and instructors, all with predictable pricing that ensures innovation doesn’t impede budget management.
Video Studio has been widely used by instructors to build rapport with first year students.
“A lot of our students come from rural areas, so, to make them feel acclimated and at ease, faculty are making introduction videos, showing them where to go for general services and other important information about the school. This has been a great addition to our orientation courses in particular.”
James Gibson, LMS Administrator, KCTCS
Expanded use of video then allows instructors to maintain strong relationships through the full learner journey. Christopher Young, an LMS Support Specialist, has seen Video Studio play a crucial role in feedback processes, helping instructors to explain complex subjects in a more personable fashion. “They're able to explain verbally what is very hard to write down and provide written context. This is particularly valuable in fields like mathematics, where instructors can walk students through each step,” he explains.
Of course, the value of video can only be truly realized when all students can engage with it equally. “Accessibility was one of the main reasons we chose Video Studio,” says Gibson, and capabilities such as alternative formats for transcripts, automated captions, and the recent addition of audio descriptions have been crucial to driving widespread adoption. “Being able to put in captions for students who might be hearing impaired has proved critical for this tool,” Young adds.
Also important for widespread adoption is ease of use. Video Studio is designed specifically for the Blackboard LMS environment, and both students and instructors pick it up immediately as it is integrated directly into their existing workflows. This means that use of video is gradually spreading to different tasks within the LMS, including discussions and assignments, without the need for a large investment in user training. “We don't even get questions on it,” notes Gibson. “It's just very intuitive and easy to use.”
Finally, like so many community colleges across the country, KCTCS is constantly striving to get the right balance between pushing learning innovation and maintaining affordability for students. Video Studio’s predictable pricing model—where video files aren’t included in the institution’s storage limit—makes it easy for James Gibson and Christopher Young to promote video use without worrying about the budget impact. “We set a storage limit for each course, and faculty are pleased that video now doesn't count against it. That's helped cut down on our internal tickets because our biology, our health science, those types of complex subjects, they typically far exceed what we give them for their course quotas. Them being able to present things in video form, where everything’s captioned, is something that our students have enjoyed and that our instructors have very much taken to,” says Young.
The Result
Widespread adoption right across the system
The addition of Video Studio to the Blackboard has impacted learning across all sixteen KCTCS colleges. In the first year since launch adoption levels have been breathtaking:
- Video has been applied in nearly 8000 courses
- 104,000+ videos have been produced
- 1,717,017 total video views
- Students have spent 335,356 minutes—or nearly eight months—engaging with video content
For James Gibson, who is coming up on 19 years of loyal service in the IT department at KCTCS, this level of traction for a new capability is completely unprecedented.
“I've never had a tool that I've integrated into the system that was picked up and used this quickly and this much. Again, it’s just really effective and easy to use.”
James Gibson, LMS Administrator, KCTCS
Epilogue
Blackboard thanks James Gibson, Christopher Young, and the full KCTCS team for many years of partnership. James and Christopher’s frequent and valuable contributions to the Blackboard Community were recognized with a Visionary Award in 2025.
