On Wednesday, March 5, Dave and Kristen met with Jason Wimmer, Jason Oakey, Jim and Eugeniu for an update on lecture capture and the pilots taking place in PCPS this semester with Panopto.
IT Services began piloting lecture capture back in Fall 2012 with two installations of MediaSite (LSC334 and LSC433). TAG members Jeremy Sepinsky and Tara Fay tested out the technology in their classes. While there were some good things about MediaSite, IT Services discovered lots of complications that would make it difficult to scale and expand across campus (see Jason’s article in the Winter 2013-2014 IT Matters for more details).
As of Fall 2013, IT Services has been working with faculty in PCPS (Counseling, Nursing, and Education – including TAG member Sandy Pesavento) to pilot a different lecture capture technology – Panopto. Panopto is a hosted service, which makes installation faster and easier in comparison to MediaSite.
IT Services set up 13 rooms in McGurrin, and already over 790 sessions/interviews/classroom scenarios/nursing simulations have been recorded. Feedback to date from faculty and students has been very positive – even enthusiastic. Gerianne Barber from Counseling noted that faculty and students both found Panopto easy to use, especially for real-time monitoring and grading of counseling sessions. IT Services staff also praised Panopto’s customer support and documentation. Other features of interest were email notifications, ease of sharing videos, video and powerpoint search, viewing analytics, and a mobile app for recording from a smartphone or tablet.
As a hosted service, Panopto has an annual licensing fee. Our current license only covers PCPS (where the pilots were taking place), but IT Services has put in a request to the FMC for a full campus license. Should funding be received, IT Services plans to expand access to lecture capture across campus and to integrate Panopto with Desire2Learn for authentication and file management. TAG and CTLE would then work with IT Services to promote the service, identify the highest interest/need among faculty, and provide training or guidance.
Jason will be giving a presentation on Panopto at an upcoming IT Forum, for any interested faculty and staff. Non-PCPS faculty can also try Panopto with a free trial.
(As a reminder, on last spring’s ECAR survey on undergraduate students and information technology, 63% of our student respondents said they wanted their professors to use lecture capture.)
