New Blackboard Building Block empowers faculty and students to seamlessly post, organize and access CourseCast content within Blackboard Learn Platform

Pittsburgh, Pa., July 14, 2009 – Panopto, Inc., a leading provider of media-rich knowledge casting and management solutions for the corporate, education, government and healthcare markets, today announced that it has developed a new Blackboard Building Block™ for its CourseCast software to increase the efficiency of students, instructors and system administrators.

Panopto has completed this new integration to the Blackboard Learn™ platform to provide users across the globe with a lecture capture solution that reduces time spent uploading, organizing, broadcasting and retrieving recorded video and audio content.

“CourseCast’s new Blackboard Building Block helps make campus-wide adoption of CourseCast a snap,” said Eric Burns, co-founder and chief technology officer of Panopto. “With CourseCast, faculty and administrators no longer have to waste hours on manual data entry or file publishing. Instead, they can focus on delivering lessons that really engage their students – both in and out of the classroom.”

With the new Blackboard Building Block, CourseCast automatically creates folders of recorded material within Blackboard Learn course Web pages, while also populating student access control lists, eliminating manual data entry and streamlining key lecture capture processes.

It also publishes recorded and real-time streaming content instantly to the Blackboard Learn platform to ensure users have access to time-sensitive lectures as they are happening.

Additionally, CourseCast now allows 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.

The addition of single sign-on technology also helps professors gauge student engagement as podcasts are tied directly to student notes, live broadcast questions and custom analytics reports.

This new functionality builds off CourseCast’s robust second-generation lecture capture platform which empowers faculty and students to create, edit and save digitally recorded video and audio podcasts through the use of a video camera or simple Web cam.

With a low total cost of ownership and the ability to record hundreds of concurrent sessions, CourseCast delivers a scalable and flexible solution that can be deployed across a single classroom or an entire university.

The new Panopto Blackboard Building Block will be available in August 2009 for all supported customers. Panopto also will be demonstrating CourseCast’s latest functionality on July 14-17 at the Blackboard World® ‘09 conference in Washington, D.C.

Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., Blackboard is a global leader in enterprise technology and innovative solutions that improve the experience of millions of students and learners around the world every day.

As a member in the Blackboard Alliance Program™, Panopto is also part of the Blackboard Developers Network™, an innovative community of technical experts with a passion for using technology to enhance teaching and learning.

Within the Network, developers from schools, colleges, universities, associations, government organizations and companies are developing software and applications— Blackboard Building Blocks™ that extend and enhance the Blackboard learning environment. Currently, there are more than 150 free or open source Blackboard Building Blocks available to users of the Blackboard Learn platform worldwide.

Blackboard®, the Blackboard Alliance Program™, the Blackboard Developers Network™, and Blackboard Building Blocks™ are registered trademarks of Blackboard Inc. and are used with permission. All rights reserved.