With four campuses based within Seminole County, Florida, Seminole State College serves over 30,000 students, full-time and part-time, is the eighth-largest member institution of the Florida College System.

With Panopto rolled out across campus, video is supporting learning experiences almost everywhere today at Seminole State.

In the classroom, Chemistry Professor Deborah Mead had long been a champion for video at Seminole State. An early adopter of the flipped classroom model, today Professor Mead relies on Panopto to simultaneously capture multiple video feeds, enabling her to include whiteboard drawings, lab experiments, traditional slides, and more in her pre-class videos.

Not only does Panopto easily support Professor Mead’s complex recordings, it also provides her with useful new insights for her classroom.

“Panopto’s analytics really help faculty see student engagement in a new way,” said McCurdy. “By tracking which parts of which videos students are watching, instructors can get a sense for which topics are more challenging for the class.”

Outside the classroom, too, Seminole State has found more use for Panopto.

The Seminole State School of Public Safety’s Emergency Medical Services program had been looking for a way to overcome the inherent difficulties of providing EMS education to full-time first responders. Unfortunately, the round-the-clock shifts required of first responders meant that there was never a time at which every student on the crew would be available to attend classes simultaneously.

In Panopto, the EMS faculty finally found an answer to that challenge, creating what they coined a “Shift-Friendly” class. Faculty could hold a class and use Panopto to stream it live for those who couldn’t attend in person, as well as make a recording available for anyone to watch on demand. There was no need to schedule multiple repeated class sessions — with Panopto, they could just make the original lesson available on-demand.

Now the EMS students and faculty go even further. “The department wanted to ensure its students could participate in real-time on debriefings of their training simulations,” recalled McCurdy. “We have simulation rooms where we can practice the proper response to a variety of crises, and now we can record those simulation training exercises. With Panopto, students can watch their performances, identify strengths and weaknesses, and even take notes on points for improvement.”

Today Seminole State extends lessons beyond the campus, to anywhere its students are.

As the school sought to increase online course offerings, it began looking for ideas to help facilitate a truly effective online speaking and presentation skills class.

With the Panopto native mobile apps for iOS and Android, as well as Panopto’s personal assignment folder feature, the eLearning Department at Seminole State was able to assist Speech faculty in designing a course that provided students online with the same level of academic rigor and audience engagement as their on-campus counterparts.

Distant learners now simply use their own personal mobile device and the Panopto mobile app to record themselves delivering a presentations to their audience, with the audience in view of the mobile device. Once completed, the recordings are then automatically uploaded to the student’s designated assignment folder, where it can be reviewed on-demand by instructors for grading and additional feedback.

Already the results of the new class have been excellent, giving online students a learning experience much closer to that of their peers on campus, and helping everyone hone the speaking and presentations skills that are so important to professional success.

Enhancing the Learning Experience at Seminole State: Looking to the future with video

Seminole State had been using video to solve learning challenges here and there for years. But when the college adopted a more comprehensive video platform, the true potential value of video became clear.

Today the school is proud to provide its students with a modern learning experience — one with more flexible instruction, more visual classroom examples, and more valuable study resources.

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