University of Dundee
Erfolge
14,000 Students
3,000 Staff
29,000 Videos Migrated
Consistently ranked among the top public research universities in the United Kingdom, the University of Dundee in eastern Scotland is home to approximately 14,000 undergrad and graduate students. With a rich history dating back to 1881, today, the university boasts three campuses and nearly 3,000 faculty and staff.
The Challenge: a growing video library without a dorm
In 2018, in support of its purpose of transforming lives, globally and locally, through the creation, sharing, and application of knowledge, the university conducted its initial search for a video management system. Video lecture capture had become commonplace among professors, amassing a substantial video library. Lacking a central repository, faculty took to various technologies, such as Kaltura and Vimeo, for video sharing and storage. As the library – and redundant platform investments – grew, the fragmented approach became unsustainable, essentially requiring IT staff to train faculty and provide support for duplicate services. The university also recognized the approach did little to serve the accessibility needs of its students.
The search led the university to choose a single lecture capture provider. Professors appreciated the ability to record and upload from the same platform, and students liked having access to lecture history through a single library.
Over the 4 years that followed, however, the university experienced reliability issues with the provider. The impacts of the issues ranged from the IT team needing to dispatch AV staff to classrooms mid-lecture to entire lectures being lost and needing to be re-recorded. Additionally, the university found timely customer support to be lacking, oftentimes needing to wait until the next day to receive Tier 2 support offshore. Captioning inaccuracies further disrupted learning.
“It’s important our team has confidence in the technology platforms and services we deliver for the university’s academic community,” shared Laura Hall, Service Delivery Manager with the University of Dundee.
The Solution: Panopto Video Management System
Revisiting its search for a video management system, the university elevated two key criteria to the top of the list: first, a stable, easy-to-use platform, and second, strong accessibility and captioning features to support its global campus community, which had grown to represent 145 countries.
The university selected the video management system Panopto, citing the platform’s intuitive user interface and powerful accessibility features. Many faculty members who had experience with the platform at prior institutions were enthusiastic about adopting it again in Dundee. Stephen Bruce, UG Learning Design and Technology Lead with the University of Dundee shared, “I used it at my last institution, so I was delighted to hear the university was moving to Panopto.”
Implementing Panopto
The university carefully planned the migration to Panopto to begin at the end of the 2023-2024 academic year, with the goal to be up and running with the new platform by the beginning of the 2024-2025 academic year. The technical implementation, which included transferring the video library, which had burgeoned to nearly 29,000 videos, was managed and led by Panopto’s service delivery team.
Integrating Panopto with Learning Management System Blackboard, or “My Dundee,” was key to achieving one of the ease-of-use objectives: for professors to launch Panopto’s recorder from within the LMS. This in-the-flow-of-learning functionality eliminated the need for separate and redundant recording rooms for lecture capture and minimized class disruption.
Versatile and Intuitive Requirements for the School of Medicine
Another imperative for the implementation was ensuring the unique video needs of the university’s School of Medicine were met. Notably rated as first in Scotland and second in the UK, the school of medicine has 1,500 students, with coursework taking place both on campus and at Ninewells Hospital.
Video lecture capture plays a critical role in the medical school curriculum and serves as a valuable study aid for students. With in-hospital lectures delivered by a combination of university faculty and healthcare clinicians—often using both hospital and university computers—Panopto’s versatile platform and intuitive user experience were of particular benefit.
Additionally, the hospital’s fast-paced, real-world lecture theater leaves little room for disruption resulting from technical challenges. Instead, the university facilitates the provision of dedicated technology faculty to strategically deploy hardware and software solutions that ensure all technology is performing as expected, so knowledge can be fully captured, streamed, shared, and viewed.
The technology team deployed a solution utilizing Blackboard, Panopto, and Extron streaming media processors (SMP) to deliver an enhanced experience for both medical school faculty and students. Faculty value the stability and ease of automated lecture capture from multiple devices, and students appreciate streamlined access to the lectures that are most relevant to their year of study. “With Panopto, we now have alignment between Blackboard Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and the video library,” stated Bruce, adding, “It’s a big move forward.”
Accessibility for the University’s Global Community
In addition to bringing rich global experiences and perspectives to students, the university’s diverse faculty brings multiple dialects and accents to lecture. This wide range of language creates a practical challenge for software: interpreting the speaker to produce accurate captions. Fortunately, with Panopto, the university is able to offer more accessible and inclusive education experiences to students. Its robust accessibility features, like automatic speech recognition (ASR), create real-time captions in more than twenty languages.
“The audio quality is better, so the captions are of a better standard because the two go hand in hand,” stated Ed Wood, Educational Technologist with the University of Dundee.
Die Auswirkungen
“One thing I have noticed is the quality of closed captions/subtitles,” adds University of Dundee faculty member Dr. Richard Holme, continuing, “These are really accurate. To me, Panopto has a huge benefit for accessibility and for teaching, learning, and student experience.”
During implementation, both IT and school of medicine staff were pleasantly surprised with the accuracy of Panopto ASR for medical terms, abbreviations, and acronyms. “For example, medical terms spoken in a Scottish accent were captioned correctly, and we honestly weren’t expecting that. We made the decision to switch to Panopto captions for our entire video library because the quality was better,” shared Hall.
Additionally, students have reported the Panopto video viewer’s simple layout makes accessibility features, note-taking, and chapters more prominent, contributing to the platform’s overall ease of use.
“One thing I have noticed is the quality of closed captions/subtitles.These are really accurate. To me, Panopto has a huge benefit for accessibility and for teaching, learning, and student experience.”
Dr. Richard Holme, University of Dundee faculty member
Vorausschauen
With Panopto in place, deeper integrations with university technologies such as Microsoft Teams are next on the docket. These integrations will accommodate student flexibility preferences and create more possibilities for distance learning and live-streaming modules.
Further, the IT team envisions a streamlined lecture capture process where faculty can start recordings effortlessly by swiping their ID badge at the lectern. “This solution would require coordination with other services like our timetabling as well as new AV hardware,” explains Jonathan Walker, Learning Spaces Technology Support Team Manager at the University of Dundee. “But Panopto keeps these options open.”
The university is also exploring the role of artificial intelligence in the faculty and student experience. One concept currently under investigation is the creation of a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) model produced entirely by ingesting university-specific data, such as in-house research and, of course, lecture captions.
“I love Panopto,” summarizes Bruce, adding, “it brings alignment to learning.”
