There’s nothing quite like University of Washington Panopto. That’s because, at Panopto, we expect teachers to be on the cutting edge of their fields. To be familiar with the latest research, to understand the history of current trends, and to see the nuance at play even in relatively settled subject matter.

We also expect them to be at the forefront of their practice, regularly testing new teaching approaches and readily adopting pedagogies that better engage and educate their students.

Video improves teaching and learning at the University of Washington Panopto

Those expectations are likely why it’s so common for individual faculty and departments to lead the adoption of academic technologies in most institutions of higher education. Individual instructors experiment, and when they find a tool that truly helps, they share that wisdom with their colleagues. collegial.

Yet, when it comes to teaching and learning, this ad hoc approach to implementing classroom technology can be both an opportunity and a burden. On one hand, such an approach enables faculty to independently reshape learning experiences and better support the needs of their specific classrooms while at the same time giving students more flexibility and control over their own learning. On the other hand, some technologies can be challenging to adopt and support on a one-by-one basis and can create headaches for administrators, instructors, and students alike when each class has its own subset of tools and technologies to work with.

“Panopto offered a superior user experience and a range of features that impressed both faculty and students. From our standpoint, the decision to make Panopto the video solution for the entire university really made itself.

Tom Lewis, Director, Academic Experience Design & Delivery, University of Washington Information Technology

At the University of Washington, recording lectures proved to be such a challenge. Early on, individual instructors and departments each began selecting their own lecture capture solutions. However, with multiple solutions in place, adoption and satisfaction among both staff and students were lower than expected. Students were frustrated by having to find course videos within different systems; video quality was often an issue, and faculty found that some tools were either hard to use or lacked the capabilities they needed to create course videos.

Finally, the university’s CIO and provost became interested in adopting a single video solution to standardize the institution’s video capture capabilities and ensure consistent student learning experiences.

Working with a group of faculty and staff who supported teaching and learning, the UW Information Technology team set out to find a single, comprehensive video solution that would be easy to use while still meeting the diverse needs of faculty and students across all three UW campuses.

The Challenge:

Meeting diverse needs for video technology

As they began their search, the UW Information Technology team first wanted to ensure a clear understanding of where their existing tools were failing and what capabilities their ideal video solution should have to fully support the needs of faculty, staff, and students.

They began by conducting a technology needs assessment that surveyed faculty and staff in twelve different schools and departments. Here’s what they learned.

Meeting the needs of students

Almost immediately, recorded lectures proved to be an extremely popular and valuable resource for students. The problem was that they weren’t always available or accessible.

Availability

Students had quickly come to rely on lecture videos to improve their comprehension of difficult subjects and used them heavily when studying for midterms or finals. With a mix of on-campus and commuter students, as well as many Division 1 athletes, lecture recordings were a well-used failsafe for those who couldn’t make it to class.

The UW wanted to ensure that lecture videos were more widely available to students. They needed a video capture solution that would enable them to automatically record lectures in all of their classrooms, and they wanted to be able to centrally schedule and manage recordings from a single dashboard. This would enable the school to offer lecture recordings for most courses while minimizing the resources and time needed to manage lecture capture at scale.

Accessibility

Accessibility was also a top priority for UW. Administrators were dedicated to making campus technologies beneficial for all students. That meant any video platform the team might select would need to be ADA and Section 508 compliant, with ample support for video captioning, screen reader use, and keyboard-based navigation.

Accessibility would, of course, be essential for students with specific learning challenges or for whom English was not their native language. Yet the benefits of accessibility would be felt by a far greater number of students, as captioning and other accessibility-focused features had also been shown to support comprehension and learning for all students.

Meeting the needs of faculty

In adopting a new video platform, UW administrators envisioned creating a learning environment that could use video alongside other technologies to make learning more active and engaging for students.

To encourage faculty to experiment with new video-supported pedagogies, the school needed to remove as many barriers to entry as possible and choose a solution with maximum flexibility.

Ease of use

Between planning for classes, delivering lectures, grading assignments, staying up to date in their field, conducting their own research and study, and the other professional demands of faculty members in higher education, instructors seldom have time to learn every last detail about every new academic technology. When testing a new tool for the classroom, the criteria for judging success is often quite straightforward: how easy is this tool to use?

For UW, the new video solution needed to be reasonably easy to learn quickly, even for those without much technical know-how or prior experience with video. That meant it would need an intuitive interface and supportive documentation and should require as little interaction from the instructor as possible while in use.

Flexible recording

While recording lectures would be the primary use for the new video platform, UW faculty also wanted to do more with video. The needs assessment showed that they wanted to be able to record their own videos outside of class, enabling them to experiment with new pedagogies as they chose.

With the ability to record from anywhere, on any device with a camera and microphone, faculty hoped to be able to incorporate video into learning in more ways, including:

• Recording micro-lectures to introduce or go deeper on a particular topic
• Recording from the field to share more direct details in the sciences and performing arts
• Sharing knowledge and information from professionals and other experts working in a particular field to give students new perspectives
• Capturing student presentations and providing detailed feedback to improve their skills
• Improving distance learning with more interactive video resources

With the detailed information from the needs assessment in hand, the UW Information Technology team set out to find and test a video solution that would be easy to use, enable
recording and editing from anywhere, support accessibility and make capturing and managing video at scale easy.

The solution:

The University of Washington Panopto is a flexible video platform and a partner for accessibility

The search for a flexible and robust yet intuitive video solution led administrators at the university to Panopto.

In the Panopto video platform, UW found a secure end-to-end video solution that could capture multi-camera video inside classrooms and from the faculty’s own devices, offered simple online editing tools for cutting and splicing, enabled video captioning at scale, and supported central administration of scheduled recording and video management.

On paper, Panopto met the full range of UW’s needs. However, before investing in the platform, the school wanted to be sure that faculty and students agreed. To find out, UW first launched a quarter-long pilot in which Panopto was installed in four lecture halls and tested by eight instructors and 530 students.

Tom Lewis, Director of Academic Experience Design & Delivery for the University of Washington Information Technology, remarked on the pilot’s results: “Panopto offered a superior user experience and a range of features that impressed both faculty and students. From our standpoint, the decision to make Panopto the video solution for the entire university really made itself. ”

UW discovers Panopto’s advantages over legacy systems

When comparing Panopto to its previous lecture capture systems, the UW IT team saw other benefits as well. Since Panopto was software-based, it could be implemented quickly across campus. Panopto also leveraged the architecture of the Internet to deliver video much in the way Netflix or YouTube do, which made video playback both more reliable and less stressful on the university’s network bandwidth. Panopto is easily integrated into many of UW’s existing systems, including its learning management system, Canvas, and the in-room AV equipment the school already has.

When it came to accessibility, UW was at the forefront of identifying and advocating for technology features that would truly make video accessible to all students. In fact, the UW had a vision for video accessibility that was ahead of where most industry-leading video solutions were at that point. Before, during, and after rolling out Panopto across all three campuses, the UW team worked toward a shared ideal for making video accessible to everyone. After the rollout, Panopto’s CEO and founder, Eric Burns, went to the UW campus to meet with the school’s accessibility leaders to establish a collaborative partnership to help ensure that Panopto would support the UW team’s roadmap for future video accessibility.

The results:

An adaptive video enhanced learning experience at UW Panopto

With Panopto, the University of Washington was quickly on the path to growing a scalable video-learning ecosystem. In just two years, faculty at the UW had created over 16,000 recordings totaling over 15,000 hours of video, ultimately capturing over 30,000 hours of video.

In the years following UW’s implementation of Panopto, the IT team conducted multiple surveys to gauge faculty and student satisfaction with it and understand its impact on teaching and learning.

The student perspective

A full 98 percent of UW students agreed that Panopto contributed to their learning, and 9 in 10 believed that viewing recordings helped them improve their grades. Students reported that Panopto was helpful when studying for exams and made it easier to review difficult or confusing material. Students also appreciated being able to re-watch a lecture as many times as they wanted and at the speed they wanted.

The faculty’s point of view

By and large, faculty found Panopto to be easy and reliable and to work well with existing systems and devices. As more and more faculty have incorporated video into their teaching practices, they reported that Panopto has enabled them to:

• Flip their classrooms and encourage active learning
• Record guest speakers
• Cover more content and have deeper discussions
• Review video analytics to improve course content

Faculty, too, believe Panopto has helped improve student learning. According to the survey responses, faculty report it’s now easier for students to get content and makeup assignments when they miss a class due to illness, athletics, or even traffic on their commute. That means students can come to office hours with productive questions instead of looking for information they missed. Faculty also feel that Panopto has been especially beneficial for non-native English-speaking students, as well as those with disabilities, and has helped provide an equal academic experience to all UW students.

Lewis and his team expect the use of Panopto at UW to continue to grow. “Panopto has made a positive impact on teaching and learning at the University of Washington,” said Lewis.

Bringing Panopto to the Internet2 community

A few years after choosing Panopto for its own campus, the University of Washington was asked to evaluate Panopto for inclusion in the Internet2 NET+ program.

Internet2 is a non-profit, advanced technology consortium that provides national, globally interwoven technology infrastructure and collaboration capabilities for the nation’s researchers, scholars, and learners. It exists to facilitate mission-critical technology services for U.S. higher education institutions in support of their educational, research, and community service missions. Today, Internet2 serves 316 US universities along with 43 regional and state education networks that support over 100,000 institutions.

Internet2 provides significant value to member universities

One of the ways Internet2 provides value for its member universities is by validating and streamlining procurement for select cloud services through the Internet2 NET+ program. To ensure that Panopto’s video platform would meet the diverse requirements of its members, Panopto underwent a rigorous service validation process with the University of Washington, as well as Northwestern University, the University of Arizona, the University of Central Florida, and the University of Notre Dame.

“Since we implemented Panopto at the University of Washington, it’s become a critical asset for our faculty and students,” said Lewis. “Over the last three years, our faculty and staff have created more than 60,000 total hours of academic recordings that students use as a valuable study aid. Just as importantly, Panopto has been a partner in our mission to provide the best possible learning experience for students. The company listens to our input, continues to evolve their service based on our feedback, and actively works with us to ensure that our implementation is always well supported.”

The two-year validation process included a comprehensive review of Panopto’s functionality, security, identity, accessibility, compliance, network architecture, and legal terms. After successfully completing the process, Panopto has become the first video platform provider for education to join the Internet2 NET+ program, offering Internet2 member institutions discounted pricing, simplified purchasing with a common customer agreement, and secure, reliable streaming delivered over the Internet2 Network.