Shortly before spring graduation in 2015, Christine Wallace, Vice President for Kettering Global Campus, received a late night text message from the university’s president: “Stream commencement. Why or why not?”

As the team charged with streaming Kettering’s courses online for students around the world, Global Campus was the natural recipient for the president’s inquiry. They immediately set out to work on a solution.

With only two weeks to prepare, the Kettering team made the decision to produce and stream the spring commencement event in-house, without bringing on any outside AV specialists. Under normal circumstances, this would have been a high-risk operation. However, Kettering had already been using the Panopto video platform to deliver recorded classroom content, and the Global Campus team was confident they’d be able to use Panopto to capture and stream the graduation ceremonies.

 

Distance Learning with Video: Kettering University’s Foundation For Success

Well before the commencement, Kettering had already found a valuable application for live-streamed video. The university used Panopto to deliver the university’s distance learning courses to students around the globe.

“Our team’s experience and comfort with Panopto made it easy to broadcast the 2015 commencement and ensure that the online event was successful,” said Dr Wallace.

Prior to using Panopto, the team had enabled distance learning by mailing long-form lecture recordings on DVDs to remote students. With Panopto, there was no longer a need for the costs and logistical hassles associated with the creation and shipping of physical media.
 

Kettering Changes the Way It Thinks About Delivering Campus Events and Online Education

Within six months, the team at Kettering had uploaded more than 100 courses to Panopto. Panopto’s video platform automatically optimized each lecture recording so that students around the world could watch it in the highest quality on any device, regardless of their internet connection speed.

After enhancing its existing distance learning program, the Kettering team found that they could also tap Panopto to address another challenge: enabling instructors to teach remotely.

With no more than a laptop, webcam, and Panopto’s recording software, Kettering’s faculty can now teach from anywhere in the world, and teachers have been quick to seize the opportunity. This semester, one of Kettering’s faculty will begin producing his lectures from Spain. And since Panopto automatically uploads each new video to a centralized “campus YouTube”, the Global Campus team knows they can always step in to support faculty with editing and publishing, regardless of many time zones separate them from one another.
 

Looking To The Future

As the need for specialized engineering education grows, Kettering University continues to expand their global reach, educating students at a distance and helping the entire campus community — digital or traditional — connect and celebrate milestone moments.

After having successfully delivered traditional, long-form lecture content with Panopto to students worldwide, Kettering is re-designing their online curriculum to better suit the needs of today’s students.

“Today we’re going from delivering hours and hours of DVD lectures to developing shorter, more focused interactions with students,” notes Dr Wallace.

With video on-demand, classroom scheduling no longer mandates the format of educational content. Instead, faculty are creating lecture videos that break along concept lines, and are including more multimedia content, demonstrations, and walkthroughs embedded inside the recordings. Leveraging Panopto’s timestamped notes, comments, and ratings features, students in Kettering’s classes are able to discuss the content with one another asynchronously.

By delivering video content to students and family members around the world in real time, Kettering is leading the way in not only helping reduce the barriers to education, but also to helping global students feel like valued members of the campus community.
 

Find Out More

Challenged to find new ways to enhance their students’ university experience, Kettering found an opportunity to expand how the school had been using its existing lecture capture platform.

Learn more about how Kettering is using video to better serve the needs of its students and their families — click to get your copy of our newest case study today.