Classroom Technologies

BUCS will be performing a major update of the Panopto lecture capture platform on Monday 30th January 2012 from 9.00am onwards.

This is in order to provide primarily critical stability and resilience fixes, but also to enable some new features. Due to the complexity of the update a full service may not be resumed until the end of the week, Friday 3rd February 2012.

During this time the service will be at risk and we do not recommend that any recordings are conducted until a formal announcement that the update has completed.

Users who have installed the desktop Panopto Recorder application on their own PC or Mac will need to update their client application following the upgrade. You will be taken to a link to download an update the next time the application is run. If the recorder application was installed by your IT supporter, please contact them so that your PC can be prepared for the update.

Any questions regarding this update, please contact lecture-capture@bath.ac.uk.

What is Panopto?

• The University of Bath uses the Panopto lecture capture platform which allows recordings of presentations to be made and relayed to audiences. This technology allows for the simultaneous capture of audio, video and any application used on a PC (including Microsoft PowerPoint) which can then be shared in a variety of ways during and/or after the presentation.
• These recordings take two forms: they can either be scheduled for automatic capture within a lecture theatre, or the Panopto Recorder software can be installed onto your PC enabling you to record with just a webcam or microphone anyplace, anytime.
• Panopto allows the viewer to start, stop, pause and rewind recordings, enabling them to actively engage with the lecture capture in at time and place most convenient to them.

Getting Started

• Introducing Panopto is a four page guide which outlines the process that colleagues should follow when thinking about capturing lecture content.
• The single page flyer 5 Reasons to Capture Your Practice gives sound evidence-based advice on lecture capture.

Support

• The e-Learning team have developed a set of Panopto related Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), answering a range of specific questions.
• A range of How To Videos and Tutorials are available from the Panopto Support website. These include screencasts giving an overview of what the Panopto Recorder does to giving advice on more in depth tasks such as basic editing of your recordings.

Housekeeping

• How do I setup a Moodle course to enable Panopto recordings?
• How do I refresh a Panopto user list for an existing Moodle course? – N.B. Step 3 of this FAQ should be completed after this years cohort of students has been enrolled. This will happen for All Year and Semester 1 units on Monday 3 October 2011.
• How do I archive a Panopto recording? – this FAQ is useful should you wish to retain a copy of your recording, prior to deleting it from the Panopto server.
• How do I delete last years’ recordings?

Usage

• Panopto was widely used during the 2010/11 Academic Year within a range of disciplines and for a number of different purposes.
• Some details on this can be found in the Lecture Capture: End of Year Summary blog post.

And finally…

• For further information on Panopto, and if you are considering using them to enhance your learning and teaching related activities, please contact the e-Learning team at e-learning@bath.ac.uk.
• To schedule recordings, please contact the Audio Visual team at lecture-capture@bath.ac.uk.

Nitin Parmar from the e-Learning team is a Steering Group member of the ESTICT Special Interest Group (SIG), which hosted at event at the University of Bath in November 2010. The full conference report from this event can be found at http://drgn.in/hWrWyP.

Instead of hosting another ESTICT event this autumn, the SIG has joined together with the 1st Turning Technologies European User Conference which is taking place in October 2011 at the University of Surrey.

Further details on the conference, and details on how to submit a proposal can be found at http://drgn.in/p5icxh.

Mark your calendars! You’re invited to be a part of Turning Technologies’ first European user conference.

This promises to be a memorable and informative event. As a conference attendee, you will have access to an abundance of knowledge and resources revolving around the use of interactive response systems and their applications in education. Share your best practices and learn how other educators use response technology. Registration and additional conference information to follow.

Save the Date

What: Turning Technologies User Conference – Co-hosted by Surrey University
When: 27 October, 2011
Where: Wates House – University of Surrey – Guildford
Cost: £50

Keynote Speaker

Dr. Eric Mazur, Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics; Harvard University, Author of Peer Instruction: A User’s Manual

Dr. Mazur’s Peer Instruction teaching method has a large international following, and has had a positive impact on teaching and learning across many disciplines. He is author or co-author of over 200 publications and 12 patents, and helped produce the award-winning DVD Interactive Teaching.

We are looking for individuals interested in becoming breakout session presenters. Share your best practices and insights regarding Turning Technologies’ response technology.

With the beginning of the new semester not too far away, the e-Learning team have been spending some time updating parts of the Classroom Technologies website. As such there are a few new resources and guides to point out.

The staff of the CU Science Education Initiative and the UBC Carl Wieman SEI have produced an excellent lecturer focused guide to the Effective Use of Personal Response Systems (Clickers) in Teaching.

According to their Clicker resources website, the guide “was written to help instructors use clickers in their classes in the most comfortable and pedagogically effective manner. It includes a section on frequently asked questions about the use of clickers and clicker questions and several good examples of clicker questions.”

For those colleagues wishing to installed the latest version of TurningPoint 2008 for Windows, version 4.3.2.1178, is now available from http://www.bath.ac.uk/lmf/download/46367. This new version contains some new functionality, such as the very useful collapsing toolbar (in presentation mode) as well as a range of bug fixes.

This software can either be installed by your IT Supporter on Active Directory PCs, or by you on personal laptops.  Don’t forget that Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, 2007 or 2010 must already be installed prior to installing TurningPoint 2008.

A number of TurningPoint 2008 specific documents have been added to the Resources section of this website too. In summary, the following new and updated resources are available as PDFs:

• TurningPoint 2008 User Guide [Office 2003, Office 2007/2010]
• TurningPoint 2008 Quick Start Guide
• 8 Steps for TurningPoint 2008
• New Users in TurningPoint 2008
• Additional Topics in TurningPoint 2008

A range of How To Videos are also available from the Turning Technologies website. These include screencasts giving details on how to insert slides into your Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, to more advance features such as setting correct answers (and indicators), inserting countdown timers, as well as how to track participant demographics.  And don’t forget the Learning Technologies FAQ database which now hosts over 70 of our most popular Frequently Asked Questions.

Should there be anything else, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the e-Learning team on 01225 384 392 or via email at e-learning@bath.ac.uk.

Earlier this year, I briefly reviewed activity on the Panopto lecture platform at the University of Bath, giving some details on how the application was being utilised by staff and students.

Now that we’re coming to the end of the 2010/11 academic year, and with this being the first academic year of Panopto implementation, I felt that this would be a good time to review the server activity levels as a whole. This, not only to draw further insights into the use of Panopto, but also help to plan for the future.

To provide some context, at the beginning of this academic year, the Audio Visual (AV) and e-Learning teams collaborated to support and enhance practical use of Panopto as another means of enhancing the student experience.

Having integrated Panopto with our institutional VLE, Moodle, the majority of recorded content is accessed through Moodle courses corresponding to taught units, and only available to authenticated users.

The data presented within this blog post covers the period week beginning 4 October 2010 (week 1) to  week beginning 13 June 2011 (week 37 – and two weeks after the end of the undergraduate assessment period).

Headline Numbers

• In the period stated above, 632,400 minutes or 10,540 hours of viewing time was spent watching, of which there were 50968 views in total.
• 1143 sessions (individual recordings) held on the system in 208 (Moodle and non-Moodle) folders. Panopto passed the “1000 recordings” mark in March 2011.
• The mean average viewing time of each recording was 10.9 minutes.
  
• The most popular recordings/users, in order of activity, have been: Department of Economics, School of Management and the Department of Chemistry.

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High Activity Periods

As can be seen from the graph below (click to enlarge), the peaks of activity in the period stated were during the end of semesters 1 and 2. This coincided with Vacation (V), Revision (R) and Undergraduate Assessment (UA) periods during these semesters.

Within these periods the breakdown of numbers is as follows:

• Semester 1 – V+R+ (2 weeks x UA): 9162 views of 2198 hours of total viewing time and an average viewing time of 14.28 minutes.
• Semester 2 – V+R+ (3 weeks x UA): 10449 views of 2838 hours of total viewing time and an average viewing time of 16.10 minutes.

The (end of semester) activity presented above represents 38% of all Panopto related views between weeks 1 and 37 of the 2010/11 academic year, and 48% of all the minutes viewed.

So, nearly half of all the minutes viewed in 37 weeks, are actually viewed within a 9 weeks period, so just under a quarter of the time.

Additionally, it is clear that the mean average viewing time per recording is between 4 to 6 minutes more during this period than the overall average, indicating that students are finding real benefit from review such recordings.

Indeed this data and the conclusions drawn are supported by material included in the 5 Reasons To Capture Your Practice resource published last month on Innovations Day.

Within this, it was written that “giving students the opportunity of a second bite of the cherry (Clark, 2010) to support their learning should be encouraged… The use of Panopto can lend itself to Nicol & MacFarlane-Dick’s (2006) suggestion of using good feedback practices to provide opportunities to close the gap between current and desired performance.”

Further Thoughts

Following on from the paragraph above, it has been suggested that the e-Learning team currently have not provided any guidance for students on how to get the best from any Panopto recordings, or why watching them might be of benefit. Currently, all resources, including our Introducing Panopto guide are focussed for staff, as well as the Lecture Capture FAQs. Certainly some development work remains here.

For staff, Panopto support has come from one or both of the AV and e-Learning, predominantly through the lecture-capture@bath.ac.uk email address. Additionally, several presentations on classroom technologies, or Panopto specifically, have been delivered at both Departmental and Faculty level.

Participants on the programmes for new lecturers – the PGCAPP and The Bath Course – have also been trailing lecture capture to support their practice, often will excellent effect. Indeed, it has allowed them to reflect on their own teaching practice, which might lead them to transform their own practice (Biggs & Tang, 2007).

A number of other lecturers have found Panopto to have been of real benefit to their students. “The use of Panopto to deliver the factual content of the unit to students as self directed study, has freed up face to face lecture time for interactive discussion” says Dr Christine Edmead, Teaching Fellow in the Department of Pharmacy & Pharmacology.

“This has led to a much deeper and more engaging learning experience for the students as through discussion and questioning I can both ascertain and provide feedback on their understanding of the material they have studied, whilst supporting them in applying their new knowledge to solve research questions.”

And finally…

If you’d like further information on Classroom Technologies, including Panopto, and are considering using them to enhance your learning and teaching related activities, please contact me at e-learning@bath.ac.uk.

Dr Gareth Hall in the Psychology Department at Aberystwyth University is currently undertaking some research into establishing an understanding of users’ experience of lecture capture facilities and how these facilities have been incorporated into teaching practices in Higher Education.

Currently, there is some debate by teaching staff in Higher Education about the negative effects of these facilities that include copyright issues, redundancy, and detrimental effects on student independent learning.  It is hoped that teaching staff’s experiences, both positive and negative, will contribute to speculative opinion of non-users with empirical evidence from current users. The little empirical that does exist at the moment suggests positive consequences on learning for lecture capturing facilities being made available to students.

Another part of the project aims to understand why some teaching staff choose not use it. For example, in addition to some of the reasons already discussed, what other reasons prohibit the take up of these facilities. For example, are non-users using other e-learning tools to enhance the student learning experiences or lecture capturing facilities are simply not appropriate for the subject matter that some staff teach.

If you would like to contribute to Gareth’s research, please contact him directly at gbh@aber.ac.uk.

During a recent conversation with a colleague at City University London, I was pointed to a recently produced video by the Education Support Team in the Schools of Arts and Social Sciences on the use of a TurningPoint-based Electronic Voting System (EVS).

The Education Support Team interviewed Dr Kielan Yarrow, Deputy Undergraduate Course Director, who spoke on his experiences of using EVS to support learning and teaching.

Dr Yarrow drew on his own practise to highlight some key points during this video as to why one might consider engaging with the technology to support their teaching. These included:

• The EVS can be to maintain student attention, by enabling an (interactive) review of what they’ve just learnt.
• The EVS enables immediate feedback to the lecturer as to whether or not the students have taken in the previous part of the lecture.
• It provides a mechanism to quickly assess students’ understanding of a given topic at the beginning of the lecture.. .and provide students with some feedback on where they are both individually, and in relation to the rest of the cohort.
• It is possible to gain feedback on some issues that students may not feel comfortable feeding back on within an open forum.

The full video, which explores the points above in more depth, can be found at: http://drgn.in/liqrHP

If you would like to would like to utilise these technologies to develop your own learning and teaching related activities, please do get in touch either on 01225 384 392 or via email at e-learning@bath.ac.uk.