The Panopto system has recently come onto the Digital Learning Team’s remit. We will be helping you manually schedule recordings (if needed!) and ensuring that scheduled recordings are taking place when and where they should. In addition, a new retention policy has come into effect this week regarding content on Panopto so I thought it was a good time for a Panopto blog update!
What is it and why do we have it?
If you are new to Lancaster University, you may not have used Panopto before or perhaps are familiar with a similar lecture capture system like Echo 360. Through the Panopto system, it is possible to record lectures and other teaching content for students to play back. It can record the lecturer and the resources like a PowerPoint or something shown on a visualiser.
Lecture capture is really useful for students as it helps them review material that they are not confident with, revise for exams and also helps them not feel left behind if they miss a lecture. Panopto is available in all lecture rooms in the following buildings: Biology, Bowland Main, Bowland North, Charles Carter, County Main, County South, Faraday, Furness, Fylde, George Fox, LICA and the Management School. It is important to note that your permission needs to be given for automatic recordings to take place, recordings aren’t turned on by default. To opt-in, get in touch with your department coordinator. Lecture recordings are turned on via LUSI for regularly timetabled sessions. For one off sessions, lecture capture can be requested by completing the relevant form. Staff are required to check that captions are provided on all recordings and to make sure that the captions are accurate to ensure that resources are accessible to everyone. Once this has been done, the recordings can be shared with students, for example via Moodle. It is also possible to add quizzes into Panopto recordings to check student understanding and make the resources more engaging for revision purposes.
During the pandemic, the number of recorded lecturers increased dramatically (as expected!). This number has remained high with 60,881 Panopto videos added to Moodle via the Panopto activity in the last academic year. Students find lecture capture a particularly valuable learning tool as highlighted in JISC’s ‘Student Digital Experience Insights survey 2022/23’ from September 2023. The survey found that students thought lecture recording was “one of the most positive aspects of learning using digital technology”. The survey also showed just how widely used lecture capture is in higher education to the point where it is considered the norm. As a result, we hope this resource will continue to be widely used by staff to support students here at Lancaster.
How is Panopto changing?
A new Panopto retention policy came into effect this week. The retention policy has come into effect to ensure that there is room for more footage to be recorded in the coming years (things were getting full!). This means that 27587 videos, which equates to around 30054 hours of footage, were placed in the Panopto archive. Don’t panic! This does not mean that they have been deleted!
The videos that have been archived were identified as resources that are over 4 years old and have not been viewed in the past twelve months. These videos have been moved to a separate storage system, the ‘archive’ in Panopto. You can still search for these videos on Panopto and request to view them. They will then be extracted from the archive which will take around 20 minutes. If these videos are then regularly viewed, they will not return to the archive, but if there are no further views in 30 days, they will return to the archive. If you have recordings on Panopto that have been archived the ‘archived’ button will appear (see image below). If there are no videos in the archive made by you this button will not be shown. Students and staff can also request archived footage that has been embedded or added as an activity in Moodle as the link on the Moodle page will take you to Panopto to make this request for archived footage. If needed, Panopto has provided some instructions on how to restore content from the archive folder.
For more information on Panopto and how to use it, look at the Panopto information available on ASK. There are also terms and conditions that come along with recording in Panopto that you should be aware of.