Panopto’s Blackboard Building Block for Focus 4.0 lecture capture software delivers several key enhancements.

Las Vegas, NV, July 12, 2011 – Panopto, Inc., a leading provider of media-rich knowledge capture and management solutions for the education and corporate markets, today announced that it has developed a new Blackboard Building Block™ for its version 4.0 of Panopto’s Focus lecture capture software to increase the effectiveness of student and faculty course recordings, organization, and retrieval.

Panopto has completed this new integration to the Blackboard Learn™ platform to provide users with a comprehensive lecture capture solution that outpaces the market with Building Block features. Features that not only streamline the enrollment process but give students, teaching assistants, and faculty more powerful tools to create and organize additional subsegments for their courses.

Among the new features, three drew significant attention among beta testing customers, including an enrollment ‘rolling sync’; mapping more than one Panopto Folder to a single Blackboard course; and support for the teaching assistant role. All features are delivered within a seamless integration framework between the two programs.

Panopto’s “rolling sync” automatically updates students as enrollment changes ensuring that roster changes are immediately recognized. There is no longer a need for administrators to manually re-provision courses Additionally, teaching and graduate assistants now have viewer or creator accounts to simplify the coordination between and among faculty and their assistants. Finally, allowing more than one Panopto Folder to map to a single Blackboard course will allow instructors to repurpose content from any previously captured courses to an active Blackboard course.

“After installing the latest Panopto Building Block in Blackboard, there is a seamless connection between the two systems. Each student has secure access to the right Panopto recordings any time they use Blackboard, without the need for any additional login or user accounts and passwords,” said Scot Gresham-Lancaster, Media & Academic Technology Services, California State University, East Bay, USA.

A key feature of Panopto’s Building Block is its ability to allow faculty and students to access Panopto recordings directly through their personalized Blackboard Learn accounts by using Panopto’s single sign-on technology. This feature ensures students have easy access to critical material, while alleviating the burden on IT staff by decreasing the number of password requests and log-in errors. Instant publishing and content streaming to the Blackboard Learn platform to ensure users have access to time-sensitive lectures as they are happening.

“With its new Blackboard Building Block, Panopto makes small and large campus-wide use of lecture capture a simple process”, said Chris Airola, Director of Product Management for Panopto. “With these new tools, students and faculty have more ways to create,organize, and manage their course recordings. These enhancements deliver the scale that large institutions need, while providing flexibility in design so almost any unique teaching or learning configuration can be met.” With a low total cost of ownership and the ability to record hundreds of concurrent sessions, Panopto Focus is the most scalable and flexible lecture capture solution in the marketplace. It can be deployed in single classrooms or an entire campus and enhance blended and online learning environments. The new Panopto Blackboard Building Block is being released during the Blackboard World® 2011 conference in Las Vegas, NV this week and will be available in August 2009 for all customers.