University Professor Workloads Spike as Fall Courses Are Delivered Online

Professors around the world recorded more than 100 million minutes of class materials during the first five weeks of fall semester, an increase of 516% over last year, as institutions adopt asynchronous, on-demand classes in response to the pandemic.

SEATTLE – Oct. 26, 2020 — Panopto, the leading video management system provider for higher education, today released data showing a dramatic increase in the digitization of classes as professors create educational materials so that students can watch classes asynchronously on-demand, anytime and anywhere. During the first five weeks of the fall 2020 term, professors recorded over 100 million minutes of digital classes, a 516% increase over fall 2019.

This fall’s increase comes on the heels of a spike in educational content over the summer. Professors recorded 460% more class material this summer than in the summer of 2019.

Minutes of digital classes created with Panopto in 2020This is an even faster acceleration of digitization than the early days of the pandemic in the spring when content creation rose 230% compared with the previous year. The rapid growth is occurring globally. Content creation in the Americas has grown 767% year over year, while Europe is up by 848%, Asia is up by 930% and Australia is up by 293% during this same year-over-year period.

As professors juggle their increasing workload, they are using more of their weekends to create asynchronous classes. Over the summer, professors uploaded six times more classroom content uploads to Panopto on Saturdays compared to the previous year. Sundays saw an increase of eight times more content uploads from last year. The number of professors working on weekends grew 463% this summer compared to last year.

“Delivering high-quality remote instruction can be a lot of extra work for instructors,” said Eric Burns, CEO of Panopto. “The world’s rapid transition to distance learning means that more than ever, professors need simple video recording tools that can support and adapt to their unique teaching styles. Panopto’s easy, reliable software has helped tens of thousands of professors around the world make the transition to creating effective online learning materials.”

To deliver engaging online classes, professors need an easy-to-use, secure video system that seamlessly connects to their university learning management system (LMS). They also need a recording and playback solution that addresses all their pedagogical needs, including multiple camera inputs, audio feeds, and presentations with PowerPoint slides. This allows a science lab experiment, for example, to be taught with multiple video angles at the lab table, along with a camera on a whiteboard, and another on the podium lecture. With 30% of classes recorded at the beginning of the fall 2020 term using multiple video inputs, professors are delivering the most engaging classes possible.

“With Panopto, I was ready for the fall term. It’s easy to use – recording and editing my flipped lectures is very straightforward,” said Dr. Lisa Ponton, associate professor of chemistry, Baldwin Wallace University. “My students appreciate the playback experience, especially the ability to read the automatically-generated full class transcript, and the ability to speed up or slow down video playback. Panopto is the ideal solution for delivering class content asynchronously.”

“I use Panopto to create videos for my music theory courses, and to help my colleagues use educational technology more effectively. I find it very easy to create, upload, edit and caption videos through the Panopto web portal,” said Shirantha Beddage, professor of music, Humber University. “The portal also allows me to search the captions of all my videos at once. This helps me stay organized as my video library grows each year. My favorite feature is the ability to create playlists: This allows me to quickly assemble and organize my content so that I can easily share multiple videos at once.”

About Panopto
Panopto’s mission is simple – to help anyone share knowledge using video. Since 2007, the company has created software that enables universities and businesses to create secure, searchable video libraries of their institutional knowledge. Privately-held, Panopto was founded by technology entrepreneurs and software experts at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. For more information, visit www.panopto.com.