Over the last decade, the team at Panopto has worked hand-in-hand with our university customers to deliver state-of-the-art lecture capture systems in thousands of classrooms worldwide. It is through these experiences that we’ve seen firsthand the innovative ways faculty and administrators have implemented lecture capture technologies to positively impact students’ learning experiences on campus.

Lecture capture systems, in the past, have typically been deployed ad hoc from department to department based on the individual needs of students and faculty in various programs — a single university might have three different “semi-official” lecture capture systems in use on campus (and often, quite a few more used by individual faculty). A new trend has emerged more recently, though, as more and more colleges begin to recognize the inefficiency of supporting scattered implementations of multiple lecture capture technologies and move to standardized campus-wide deployments.

This shift towards scaled campus-wide lecture capture installments is partly attributable to the advances in software-based video technologies that make lecture capture possible almost anywhere at the touch of a button. But the real catalyst to this change has been educators who are leading the way to reimagine the design and delivery of high-quality education.

Colleges are now more than ever focused on developing scaled educational technology systems that, as a whole, optimize student experiences and outcomes, while better supporting faculty and staff. In fact, many of our customers who have chosen to standardize their lecture capture systems rave about the successes they’ve observed — from the administrative level all the way down to individual student experiences — after switching to one lecture capture provider and scaling provisioning across campus.

While the impacts of standardizing one uniform lecture capture experience across the entire university vary from institution to institution, we’ve analyzed the most common successes and broken down the advantages into four main categories.

The 4 Benefits Of Standardizing Lecture Capture Campus-Wide

 

1. Improved Adoption By Faculty

After standardizing lecture capture across campus, one of the biggest improvements our customers have seen is the rate of adoption and usage of video technologies by faculty. With a single, easy-to-use lecture capture technology at their disposal and reduced complexity to navigate, colleges with standardized video systems see more professors in more departments across campus utilizing video capture to impact learning in their classes.

Prior to its decision to standardize lecture capture on campus with one video platform, Yale University faced inconsistent adoption of what they perceived as a valuable teaching tool. After performing a technological needs assessment, Yale concluded that it needed to find one video technology to support its entire campus.

Panopto’s ease of use was a deciding factor in Yale’s decision to implement Panopto in place of its previous systems. Douglas McKee, former Associate Chair and Senior Lecturer in Economics at Yale and currently Senior Lecturer at Cornell University, found Panopto exceptionally easy to use.

“Panopto’s video library is much more usable than the other platforms I’ve used (MediaCore, Echo360, and Kaltura),” said McKee. “Likewise, Panopto’s search is miles better. I especially like that it automatically indexes every word spoken and shown in my presentation, and that the search results point to the exact moment in the video where the search term is used — my students *love* that.”

Angela Lee-Smith, Senior Lector in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, also weighed in.

“Panopto was very easy and convenient for course members to use, both faculty and students,” noted Lee-Smith. “I’d absolutely recommend Panopto to other instructors.”

Read about Yale’s campus-wide adoption of Panopto in our new case study post.

2. Technical Support Staff Become More Efficient and Effective

To AV and IT staff at most colleges, the impact of consolidating to one lecture capture system is transformative. Technical support staff are able to free up time for proactive technology initiatives when they go from managing and maintaining three or more systems down to one lecture capture system. Training users also becomes more efficient and effective, since students and educators only have to learn one video tool.

And perhaps one of the most useful features — remote scheduling — becomes even more valuable when technologist can log in to one system in order to monitor and manage all of the classroom recordings on campus.

For the University of Arizona, supporting the myriad of tools (to say nothing of managing all the various software updates and recognizing and addressing technical issues with each as
they popped up) was an enormous task. By standardizing the systems across campus, they could better ensure that, when something did go wrong, there would be more than one expert on campus to troubleshoot it.

The advantages of standardizing one lecture capture systems across campus were clear to Mark Felix, Director of Instructional Support in the Office of Instruction and Assessment at University of Arizona.

“We wanted to be able to say: go to this website, download the software, and it will work. And that’s what Panopto does for us.”

The University of Arizona embraced Panopto and now produces a staggering amount of educational video content — 2TB of lecture capture video a week. Just as impressive is how its massive student body engages with the recorded videos. Read about how the University of Arizona went from scattered to scale with Panopto.

3. Personalized, Inclusive Learning Experiences for Students

For any university researching the advantages of implementing lecture capture at a larger scale, the impact it will have on their students is clearly a key consideration. Video solutions for education in general offer a lot of benefits that support student learning, from capturing and engaging students to helping them better understand complex subjects.

But at scale, video technology that is used widely throughout campus can create more personalized and inclusive learning experiences for students. This, in turn, can help improve student outcomes, as well as support student recruitment and retention.

When Creighton University scaled lecture capture throughout their campus with Panopto they noticed a remarkable transformation in the way teachers were teaching and the impact it had on students — teachers were flipping their classes to free up class time for active learning.

“We’re seeing this a lot now,” said Rick Murch-Shafer, an instructional designer at Creighton University. “Professors are changing the way they teach because of the technology. By assigning lectures outside of class, they have more time for classroom discussion, labs, and other forms of group work.”

Learn about Creighton’s innovative BlueCast system and its campus-wide rollout of Panopto.

4. Maximized Return On Investment For The Institution

All of the previous benefits of a scaled and standardized lecture capture system lead to one big advantage that every campus CIO will love: maximum return on investment.

The best way to optimize the return on your lecture capture investment is to maximize usage while minimizing the cost of deployment — this is exactly what standardizing your video technology throughout your entire campus will do. Lower barriers to entry for faculty, reduced demands on support staff, and better student outcomes each contribute to the value that will be easy to see at scale.

Service and support are also critical for maximizing your investment in one video platform that you plan to use at scale. By working side-by-side with customers, Panopto stands out amongst other lecture capture solutions by delivering superior product support and regular product updates, ensuring our platform grows and evolves along with our customers.

After the University of Arizona rolled out Panopto to its entire campus, Mark Felix commented, “One of the best things about Panopto has been their level of support. Panopto has been a nice fit on the product side, and an excellent partnership on the support side.”

 

 

We Wrote The Book On Recording Lectures

Whether you’re looking to set up lecture capture in your own classroom or you’re looking to enable video capture anywhere on campus, our latest e-book will guide you through considerations for recording in different spaces, capturing various use cases, and it dives deep into recording equipment options. We even diagram some of the most common lecture capture setup examples, from simple laptop recordings to advanced distributed recording setups.

Get the essential guidebook today.

Download Our Free E-book: How To Set Up Any Room For Lecture Capture