Panopto: Recording, Hosting, and Engaging

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 09:40:44 -0500
abrams, ariev, effective-practices, itnm, panopto, penniston, sp2022

UMBC adopted Panopto in fall 2018. Use has increased since this time, in particular spurred on by geometrically increased adoption with the migration to fully online and then hybrid learning in response to the still ongoing pandemic. Over the past calendar year, there have been 9,764 sessions created by 578 unique users, with 424k content interactions, totalling approximately 105K hours of viewing. Of the faculty who have used Panopto during this time, 56% are from CAHSS, 21% from COEIT, and 17% from CNMS. Math/Stat has the highest department-level use with 11% of all sessions created.

For those not yet familiar with this tool, Panopto provides both a downloadable and web-based recorder for faculty, students, and staff to create video screencasts, as well as a cloud-hosted platform for sharing content. Recordings can be embedded within Blackboard (Bb), or shared independently of our Learning Management System (LMS). The benefits of Panopto for instruction are numerous: faculty use the tool to support their overall instructional strategies for engagement, communication, and assessment. Users create easy-to-make and publish, accessible content with a stable, user-centered interface and workflow that promotes academic success with student-submitted assignments and embedded quizzing for knowledge checks; they leverage detailed analytics metrics to identify potential risk behavior; and they reduce the impacts of Bb quota limitations and improve system performance by pulling video content out of the LMS.

A survey of those UMBC faculty who use Panopto most frequently highlighted several benefits of using the tool, including facilitation in creating active learning environments, development of accessible content, and enhanced student learning assessment. Respondents provided rich qualitative details about their experience with this platform. Professor Manil Suri with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, for example, noted the utility of the platform for facilitating learning. “I now have students watch my recorded lectures, many of which have quizzes embedded in them, to make sure they are following things….Panopto enables me to turn the classroom into an active learning environment.”

Dr. Neha Raikar, a lecturer in the department of Chemical, Biochemical, and Environmental Engineering, echoed this sentiment that these screencasts can help bridge the synchronous/asynchronous divide by breaking down difficult lecture concepts using videos with built-in knowledge checks. “Panopto allows the students to digest the content at their own convenience.”

Anushka Aqil, an adjunct faculty member with the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health, described the complementary benefit of the platform’s integrated media captioning, which supports Universal Design for Learning (UDL). “Panopto allows me to record videos that can have an automatic transcription at the end so students can easily follow along at their own pace choosing to read the transcript or listen to my voice!"

Panopto’s recent product updates released at the beginning of January offer a number of improvements, as detailed in their release notes. Please note that with updates to Version 11.0.0, Mac users should confirm that they have updated their operating system to the latest version, as support for legacy operating systems will become more limited in Summer 2022. More details about Panopto versions and Mac operating system functionality is available in this FAQ.

To learn more about Panopto, please register for these upcoming training sessions:

Panopto Essentials 3.2.22 12:00 PM

Panopto Quizzing and Captioning 3.9.22 12:00 PM

By Tom Penniston, Peter Ariev & Josh Abrams