CLAS is a video platform custom-built for the needs of educational institutions and does much more for teachers and students than YouTube or enterprise video products like Kaltura. CLAS has been incubated at UBC for over four years, and has served more than 100 course sections at UBC and partners around the world. CLAS let instructors and university administrators create online spaces to collect and share videos from multiple sources and have viewers post threaded comments attached to specific points on those videos, or even replying with videos of their own. These online spaces can be access-managed precisely to a department, a course, an arbitrary group, or one-on-one, and the interface focuses each user to only the videos and discussions that are relevant to them. Each “online space” in CLAS is highly configurable independently of one another.

Due to this flexibility, CLAS has been used in flipped classrooms, for one-on-one and group feedback over music performances and student presentations, as an embedded component of online courses and exams, as a portfolio submission portal for prospective students, and more… Analytics is also available out of the box. Unlike in generic enterprise video products, the data in CLAS can be aggregated not only per video, but also per student or per course, and includes more than just video viewing behaviours but also discussion behaviours. CLAS can be integrated with student information systems at universities and authentication systems such as Shibboleth and CAS.