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.

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.

To support the Classroom Technologies showcase during Innovations Day, the e-Learning team are pleased to announce the release of two guides to support members of staff in their use of the Panopto, the lecture capture platform.

Introducing Panopto is a four page guide which outlines the process that colleagues should follow when thinking about capturing lecture content. In particular, it focuses on five distinct stages — Prepare, Book, Capture, Share and Archive — as appears below.

The PDF guide can be downloaded from: http://www.bath.ac.uk/lmf/download/51820.

The single page flyer 5 Reasons to Capture Your Practice gives sound evidence-based advice on lecture capture and is available as a PDF at: http://www.bath.ac.uk/lmf/download/51821

Both resources from the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Office of the University of Bath are an Open Educational Resources and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (except the Panopto screen image and the LTEO logo).

For  information on either of the publications, or for further advice and support with capturing your practice, please contact the e-Learning team at: e-learning@bath.ac.uk

Lecture Capture at the University of Bath has recently been cited as good practice by INAVATE, EMEA’s leading online resource for Pro AV technology & integration.

Simon Hillier, Deputy Audio Visual Manager, is quoted during the article and gives details as to why Panopto was chosen as the university’s lecture capture solution. He goes on to explain how it works, including its integration with Moodle, the institutional Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). To read more, do head along to the INAVATE website.

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.

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.

For those colleagues who use the Audience Response System (ARS), a range of How To Videos are 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.

Similar to the approach taken above, the Panopto Support website hosts a range of How To Videos, which includes 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.

Further support resources are also available in the Resources section of this website. 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 me at e-learning@bath.ac.uk.