Butler University first came to Panopto when professors at Butler’s College of Pharmacy and Health Science (COPHS) became interested in using video for student skill assessments in their Physician Assistant and Pharmacy programs.

The Challenge:
The College needed a way to record classroom sessions in which students practiced their skills (through role playing with other students, as well as on simulated patients) so that their proficiency could be evaluated by their peers as well as their professors.

Although some of these sessions were already being recorded, the college was looking for a cost-effective way to expand the use of student recording that would also enable both students and professors to view and share videos from any location.

The Solution:
With Panopto, the process of recording student assessments has greatly improved.

Today, students learning to be Physician Assistants record themselves interacting with standardized patients using the iPad®. Recordings are automatically uploaded to the Panopto video content management system (VCMS) and encoded for streaming to any device. The professor is able to view the videos at any time and critique the student’s performance. Likewise, students review their own videos and assess their own performance. Self-assessment is a great learning tool. Sometimes students are not aware of certain actions and seeing it on video is helpful in perfecting techniques.

These recordings also serve as practice before students are evaluated in a summative nature. “Often, it’s a more formative opportunity. In some exercises, if they don’t like the recording, they can do it again,” says Jennifer Snyder, an Associate Professor in the Physician Assistant program. “Being able to record their practices gives them a feeling of comfort.”

Over the past several years, the use of Panopto at COPHS has grown to now include lecture capture and flipped classroom scenarios.

In addition to student assessment, Professor Snyder has been using Panopto to flip her Clinical Medicine course. She records brief 7-10 minute videos that her students view before class. Class time is spent discussing the concepts from the videos or applying the information in case presentations.

Professor Snyder believes that flipping her classroom using Panopto has improved the quality of discussion during class. She says, “It’s a much higher level of thinking when you go into the in-class discussion. It allows the students to really be ready for what you’re going to discuss that day, so it’s a richer discussion of the material.”

Lecture capture has had a positive impact in COPHS’s Pharmacy program, where almost every class is recorded by Panopto. According to the department’s 2011 survey:

• More than 60% of students felt that Panopto helped improve their exam grades.
• 74% of the students reported using Panopto to revisit lectures they had already attended in order to review harder material
• The majority of students reported that Panopto did not increase the likelihood of skipping class.

According to one student quoted in the study, “Panopto has positively affected my learning experience. It is especially beneficial in difficult classes. Listening to sections of the lectures multiple times has helped me learn the material more effectively.”

Find out more about how Butler is improving classes campus-wide with video — download our newest case study today.