In November 2019, I attended the annual Panopto conference and as always it was an interesting event. Many Universities and Colleges had the opportunity to share ideas, consider solutions and discuss common trends not only with Panopto but with lecture and content capture as a whole. It also allowed Panopto to highlight any new developments and provide an insight into the direction of the sector for the next 12-18 months.

The morning Keynote was delivered by Eric Burns (the co-founder and CEO, Panopto) who provided an overview and update of Panopto. Eric was also able to reveal the launch of their new Manual Recorder. Currently, the majority of use within our institution is with the Remote Recorder (the version that allows you to schedule a recording of a lecture), however over the last year we have seen a significant increase in the use of the Manual Recorder, and with this update I can see it increasing further. The big news here was that Panopto are moving to a browser based solution, moving away from its current ‘download and install’ client-based software solution as seen in previous versions. This means that all you’ll need is an Internet connected device and a microphone to begin creating content. This is due for BETA testing early 2020.

View the ‘Keynote: Focus on the Future’ session.

Other topics covered

• An overview of improvements to the Panopto ASR, the software behind the automatic captioning;
• Text and voice search functions within Panopto;
• The move to a browser-based manual recorder will contain better recording functionality and better navigation;
• Better notifications for lecturer and students, allowing for question and answer sessions contained within lecturer recordings;
• Chrome extension allowing you to add Panopto content to online documents in Office 365;
• Better Zoom webinar integration;
• More system analytics including making it available to PowerBI and Salesforce;
• Better retention policy tools;
• More API functionality and scheduling options, adding the ability to make lecture captures available after a set time.

(View the ‘New features – and how they can help your institution’ session).

The invited Keynote speakers were Olaf Spittals and Dries Vanacker from Arteveldehogeschool (Ghent, Belgium) who spoke about attainment and attendance in a lecture captured course, and Professor Gilly Salmon from OES looking at Education 4.0 and whether video will be the corner stone of this.

During the afternoon, the conference split into parallel sessions with one half looking at the pedagogy of the tool and the other half looking at technical aspects. This year, we were invited to present on our recent work with simulated learning in our Medical School and Optometry programmes. My colleague Andrew Reid and I, discussed the success that we’ve experienced when using Panopto to enable Lecture and Content Capture, especially within these simulated & experiential learning scenarios and where we think we can drive this forward in the future.

Here, you can view our presentation for the Panopto conference, 2019.