Late last week, I gave a short presentation to my colleagues in the Learning & Teaching Enhancement Office on the virtues of Panopto, the lecture capture software, and explored some of the data and statistics behind its use.

Whilst colleagues can view the full presentation on SlideShare, I was keen to pick out some of the headline figures to date within this forum.

  • Over last 12 months, 5364 hours of content has been watched, of which there were 33,133 views.
  • Number of sessions (individual recordings) held on system – 785
  • Number of folders (e.g. Moodle and non-Moodle) – 150

The most active courses/users, in order of activity, are:

  1. Department of Economics
  2. School of Management
  3. Department of Chemistry

Most interesting perhaps is the increased use of the service in the 12 month period from 18 January 2010 to 17 January 2011.

panopto-usage

As users can see from the graph above  (click on the image to enlarge), a number of trends can be identified.

  • From the period January to early October 2010, it is clear that the service was a pilot one, with its use and deployment slightly under the radar. This lack of publicity was intentional, so that the software could be trialled with a small-ish number of users, and any issues addressed, prior to institutional deployment.
  • Following the deployment of Panopto to a production server, along with some profile raising of the service in September/October 2010, and more lectures than ever are being captured and subsequently viewed by students.
  • Whilst there is a dip in use (as expected) over the Christmas vacation period, is clear that recorded material is being viewed by students in the run up to the semester 1 examination period during mid-late January 2011.

Despite this increased in use, it is pleasing to report that the Panopto server was able to cope with this increase usage load and have been available to students through the revision period, without any problems. With 49,000 minutes of content viewed over a two week period in early January, any performance problems could have posed an issue.

Whilst we’re some way off having every undergraduate and postgraduate lecture captured, the data presented above does indicate that the implementation of such a service was warranted and much needed. Indeed, whilst research varies on the real pedagogical value of capturing lectures for later playback — not to mention the contrasting data on lecture attendance as a result, between institutions) — it is abundantly clear that students are viewing recorded content and finding it an invaluable revision resource.

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.