Panopto Blog

May 14, 2012

Lecture Capture Goes Campus-Wide at Creighton University, Part 3

Expanding Adoption

This is the third in a series of 4 posts featuring Creighton University's BlueCast lecture capture system, powered by Panopto. These posts will cover Creighton's implementation from trial to campus-wide capture as follows:

1.     Competition and Selection
2.     Introducing Bluecast
3.     Expanding Adoption
4.     Spotlight: Creighton live streams "Match Day" ceremony with Panopto

Panopto in a computer lab at Creighton University

Panopto spreads organically

After one year of Panopto deployment, Creighton University’s BlueCast Lecture system has grown from a small 5 course pilot program into an essential campus service with over 10,000 recordings. The lecture capture team from Creighton’s Division of Information Technology (DoIT) no longer needs to convince departments to adopt the technology, because students are demanding it.

“We’re often contacted by individual faculty whose students are asking to have their classroom sessions recorded,” says Rick Murch-Shafer. Just last week, a professor stopped by the DoIT office—at his students’ insistence—to learn how to record a review session later that day. “I quickly provisioned the course for him and then went to his classroom for a quick demonstration,” recalls Tobias Nownes. “When I asked him to login to the system, he just looked at me with a blank stare. He’d never used a campus computer before.”

“Even with that level of unfamiliarity,” continues Nownes, “he was ready to go within minutes and successfully recorded his review session later that afternoon.” Application specialist Brent Saltzman remembers sitting down to his computer at 8am the next morning and seeing 15 students reviewing the new review session simultaneously. An easy success for the professor quickly became a critical resource for his students.

Freeing up class time

As Instructional designers at Creighton, Murch-Shafer and Nownes help faculty develop online courses for various programs across campus. Most of the content is pre-built, including the lectures. Once recorded, professors are able to use the same “evergreen content” rolling from semester to semester, especially for 100 level courses where the themes don’t change as much. If the material becomes dated or a shift in focus necessitates new content, instructors can edit and add to their existing sessions or record new ones.

“Because of the flexibility of the system, faculty are now able to effect a kind of “time shift,” reflects Nownes. “Students watch the Panopto lecture before class, and the instructor can address points of confusion directed by the students in the classroom.”

“We’re seeing this a lot now,” agrees Murch-Shafer. “Professors are changing the way they teach because of the technology. By assigning lectures outside of class, they have more time for classroom discussion, labs, and other forms of group work.”

New Use Cases

With the rapid growth of Creighton’s BlueCast system in popularity and adoption, Saltzman and his DoIT colleagues have begun encouraging more expansive use cases of the Panopto software.

The first extensive non-lecture use of Panopto began early in Creighton’s deployment. The School of Medicine began recording practice doctor/patient consultations from 10 “small group rooms” which were already outfitted with cameras and mics.

“They had already been recording these sessions with Windows Movie Maker,” recalls Murch-Shafer. “They switched to Panopto right away and loved it. It’s a much easier process for them now. They simply input the students name and push record. The recordings are uploaded to the LMS automatically upon completion, and the instructors are free to review the sessions at later time.”

A variety of groups on campus are beginning to use Panopto to create distance learning programs and to broadcast academic events as well. In 2011, Saltzman used Panopto to broadcast Creighton’s Presidential Convocation. “Broadcasting this event used to be a difficult thing to do,” says Saltzman. “But with Panopto, I was able to trim the beginning and ending of the recording in the Panopto editor, and distribute the link within an hour. This capability is becoming a real plus for us.”

Next up: Creighton live streams “Match Day” ceremony with Panopto

May 11, 2012

Pearson Partnership Expands to include Enterprise and Government

This was an exciting week for all of us at Panopto and for our colleagues at Pearson. Representatives from both companies were in Denver at the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) Annual Conference where we issued a joint press release announcing an expansion of our partnership.

Since May 2011, Pearson has been offering Panopto lecture capture software to clients in Higher Education along with their own world-class educational content, technology and services. This week, Pearson announced plans to integrate Panopto’s award-winning knowledge capture and management platform into their customized learning solutions for the professional market.

This collaboration between the world leader in learning and one of the fastest-growing software companies in the market will bring both deep experience and innovation to a market eager for comprehensive learning solutions. Pearson and Panopto will deliver online training and development products to corporations, professional associations, and government agencies around the world, offering a new standard of integrated technology, content, and service for corporate learning.

Our expanding partnership should be welcome news to the professional market, as investing in workforce learning has become more important than ever. It is now a key driver of business success. A recent study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that companies in the top quarter in training expenditure per employee per year ($1,500 or more) average 24 percent higher profit margins than companies that spend less per year.

Video has also become critical for both formal and informal training in the workplace. According to a 2011 Training Industry, Inc. report, "Enabling informal learning to make content more accessible to more learners is the top reason that learning professionals said that their companies adopted technology.”

Video use in the enterprise is clearly reaching a tipping point. Gartner estimates that by 2016, corporations will be creating over 16 hours of video per employee per month! That’s only 4 years away, but it shouldn’t be too surprising. As consumers, we have become accustomed to inexpensive, easy-to-use media solutions and are increasingly using video for research, entertainment, and communication. We no longer just admire simple, intuitive technology, we demand it.

The Pearson-Panopto partnership promises to deliver both sides of this same coin: to bring affordable, easy-to-use video capture and management solutions into the workplace along with more than a century of proven content, technology and service. Welcome to the professional market, Partner.

-Tom Johnson

May 7, 2012

Lecture Capture Goes Campus-Wide at Creighton University, Part 2

Introducing BlueCast

This is the second in a series of 4 posts featuring Creighton University’s BlueCast lecture capture system, powered by Panopto.  These posts will cover Creighton’s implementation from trial to campus-wide capture as follows:

1.     Competition and Selection
2.     Introducing Bluecast
3.     Expanding Adoption
4.     Spotlight: Creighton live streams “Match Day” ceremony with Panopto

Creighton University Student uses Lecture Capture

Preparing to go Live

After completing their pilot programs in the Spring of 2010, the lecture capture team from Creighton’s Division of Information Technology (DoIT) began preparing to go live with Panopto for the Fall term. They decided to initiate a gradual rollout in order to test the system fully before ramping up across campus. “Our first step was to identify academic units with a lecture-based instructional methodology,” recalls Tobias Nownes. “We felt like these groups gave us the best chance for broad initial adoption and would help us gauge use and management requirements as well as impact on student learning.”

The Creighton College of Business was among the first groups to be invited as was the School of Medicine which had already instituted its own form of grassroots lecture capture. “They were using a portable mp3 player to record lectures,” says Rick Murch-Shafer. “A designated student would be responsible for recording the lecture, uploading it to a central server, and then manually linking it to our LMS.”

Around the same time, Murch-Shafer noticed some unusually large files being uploaded to the LMS by the Biology department. “I found a couple of Biology courses that had about 1.5 GB of data in their folders,” remarks Murch-Shafer. “Turns out they were already recording MP3s of their lectures at a very high quality, but without taking any care to compress the files and conserve space on our servers. So we went to Biology (and later Chemistry) and invited them to be part of the initial rollout, essentially offering them an automated, feature-rich way to accomplish their original intention. They jumped at the opportunity.”

A/V Decisions

From the beginning, the DoIT team appreciated Panopto’s ability to plug-and-play in virtually any A/V environment. As the team prepared their selected departments and faculty for the initial rollout, they also took the time to test a variety of A/V equipment and build a coherent workflow for outfitting new classrooms. “We wanted to develop a consistent install base to make provisioning our classrooms an easy process,” says Murch-Shafer. “Our classroom team has done a phenomenal job of optimizing installations, equipment positioning, and cable routing.”

The standard capture-enabled classroom at Creighton now includes:

  • An Osprey 100 Video Capture Card
  • One (or more) security-type cameras for capture
  • An Acoustic Magic voice tracker array microphone, ceiling mounted
  • Lavaliere mics in the larger rooms (no one uses them in medium and small rooms)

From the beginning, the DoIT team has adhered to the practice of outfitting all of the classrooms in a department before attempting a department-wide lecture capture expansion. According to Nownes, “we quickly learned that the best way to achieve broad adoption within a college or department was to offer the same capture experience in every room an instructor was likely visit.”

Going Campus-wide

With their rooms ready and Biology, Chemistry, Medicine, and Business all onboard, DoIT was ready to launch BlueCast in the Fall of 2010. “Our rollout was measured both in terms of installation and the use cases we initially allowed,” admits Murch-Shafer. “We wanted to test the impact of widespread video capture on our network and servers before we opened the floodgates, so initially, we only allowed lectures to be recorded.”

The team was not disappointed. “We were very impressed during our trial by how quickly recordings were uploaded to the server upon completion,” suggests Murch-Shafer. “We all expected these rates to diminish as more simultaneous sessions were recorded and uploaded across campus, but they didn’t, which was a pleasant surprise. Current upload times are still swift and impressive.”

As usage steady increased, the DoIT team hired Application Specialist Brent Saltzman to manage and grow the system. According to Saltzman, BlueCast “caused quite a buzz on campus” in its first year, and is now being used in virtually every corner of the university. As groups continue to express interest, the DoIT team takes every opportunity to expand usage and enable more classrooms.

As of March 2012, they have outfitted 120 of a targeted 170 classrooms, and every building on campus now has at least one capture-enabled classroom. This rapid expansion and adoption has produced some remarkable usage statistics.

By the numbers

The following statistics represent cumulative usage from October 2010 through January 2012.

Total Recordings 10,283
Total Views 217,259
Total Hours Recorded         8,222 hrs = 342.6 days = 11.5 months
Total Hours Viewed 101,148 hrs = 4,214 days = 11.5 years
Total Disk Space 2,636 GB (2.7 TB)

Up next: Expanding Adoption

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