University of Arizona

Like most institutions, the University of Arizona came to uncover the potential value of adding lecture capture to the learning experience by small-scale experimentation, with the university’s departments leading the way. 

Always on the lookout for new tools to help students learn, many of UA’s schools and departments had independently made the decision to invest in lecture capture technology. In just a few short years, select lecture halls around campus found themselves awash in an array of lecture capture hardware – each featuring different appliances, different capabilities, different vendors, and different support requirements, depending on what technology any given department had invested in. 

While managing each system had its own challenges, on the whole the technology was garnering interest. Lecture capture allowed faculty to record their largest class sessions and make them available to students using Apple’s Podcasting platform. Students, in turn, found the recorded presentations to be essential study aids, making it easier to actively participate in classroom discussions instead of worrying about writing down every possible note. 

As interest grew, faculty began looking beyond just their largest lectures and began expressing interest in capturing discussion sessions, lab demonstrations, blended-learning techniques, and virtually every other lesson format. Yet as faculty sought out new opportunities to leverage the new video tools their departments had put into place, the same three challenges began appearing over and over. 

The first stumbling block was one common to academic video – the hardware itself. Many of the university’s first lecture capture installations were hardware-based solutions, built around specialized, expensive recording appliances that resided permanently in lecture halls. This lack of mobility limited the usefulness of those first solutions – they offered faculty no means to record video from their offices or capture examples remotely in the field or the lab. 

The second issue was that, for students who took classes across multiple departments, having multiple lecture capture solutions meant an inconsistent experience. Students had to independently remember how to locate and play each video from each class. Video quality was highly variable as well – some of the systems included support for high-definition video and multiple video sources, while others provided only a single, fixed camera in the back of the room. 

Third, and perhaps most challenging of all, were the demands for support the departmental approach has placed on all of the university teams involved. Supporting the myriad tools, to say nothing of managing all the various software updates and recognizing and addressing technical issues with each as they popped up, was an enormous task. 

Taking all it had learned and applying a proactive approach, Arizona’s CIO team sought to find a single solution that could not only solve the challenges the previous systems had experienced, but affordably and reliably scale up to meet the growing video needs of nearly 50,000 faculty, staff, and student users all across campus.

Thanks to the implementation of Panopto prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, faculty at the University of Arizona were quick to shift to online learning while social distancing precautions were put in place. The majority of faculty were already using Panopto, and the UA technology team offered training sessions for those who had not yet used the VMS to share how to incorporate video into the classroom experience. 

As students returned to in-person instruction, though, faculty continued to see the value of Panopto. In a post-pandemic world, technologies at the University of Arizona have given rise to new forms of learning that blend in-person and online instruction, as well as synchronous and asynchronous learning. Some faculty have begun to shift what they’re reviewing in the classroom versus what can be done at home. For example, some faculty are flipping the classroom, recording a lecture prior to meeting and using the in-person time to actively host discussions or solve problems as a group. 

The technology team also saw a rise in questions regarding video analytics and how this can impact learning outcomes. Faculty are reviewing analytics to see how often students are accessing the videos to help inform the learning experience, whether that is adding an additional learning video or dedicating in-person class time to review a particularly challenging subject. 

While Panopto may have been a part of the University of Arizona campus for years, faculty are continuing to find new uses for learning videos in their classroom experience.