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This Week In Ideas Shared With Panopto — October 16, 2015

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If you ever wanted to prove you had an idea that could break the sound barrier, history tells us this second week of October is the time to show it.

The trend dates back to 1947, when Bell Aircraft and US Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager proved that an airplane could fly faster than the speed of sound in tests of the experimental X-1 rocket plane.

65 years later, the sound barrier would fall once more — this time not to a machine, but a man. Financed by energy drink company Red Bull as a viral marketing campaign, Australian skydiver Felix Baumgartner stepped out into the air nearly 24 miles above the Earth, reaching Mach 1.25 during his freefall.

Until each succeeded, most believed it couldn’t be done. The speed would rip the rivets right out of the plane, would make it impossible to open a parachute.

But every idea is impossible until it has a champion.

Both Bell and Yeager and Red Bull and Baumgartner knew they had found a way. They’d made the calculations. Crafted the plans. Tested and practiced. They knew breaking the sound barrier wasn’t something that couldn’t be done, it was merely something that hadn’t been done.

When both proved that Mach speeds were indeed possible, they captured the world’s attention. Back in `47, Yeager’s demonstration made headlines. Three years ago, after YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and technologies helped to make video easy to share and view anywhere, Baumgartner’s step became the most-watched recording in history.



This week we saw more and more people taking advantage of the power of video to share ideas, present information, and show how the world works. And in the spirit of passing it on, these are just a few of the ideas shared this week with Panopto’s video presentation software.
 

When Charm Is Not Enough - Panopto Video Presentation Software

When Charm is Not Enough: Exploring Mobility, Educational Opportunities, and Neighborhood Exposure in Black Baltimore
Join Richard Lofton of the Pathways for Poverty Consortium for this presentation at the Johns Hopkins School of Education as part of the school’s Doctoral Speaker Series. Lofton explores the factors that have made West Baltimore the place it is today, and examines the circumstances of concentrated poverty in the city and what it means for the educational needs of its students.
 

Form and Substance in Property Rights - Panopto Video Presentation Software

Form and Substance in the Determination of Property Rights: Set-off, Flawed Assets, and Security Interests in Cash Deposits
Whether a contract creates a proprietary interest or merely personal rights is an issue with which the law has had to grapple many times. The result in a particular case will often depend on the approach of the courts to characterisation: should it be a matter of form or of substance? This presentation by Professor Tony Duggan of the University of Toronto examines these issues in the light of the decision of the Canadian Supreme Court in Caisse Populaire Desjardins de l’Est de Drummond v Canada [2009] SCC 29, and reflects on the implications for the law in Canada and throughout the common law world. This presentation will be of great interest to all concerned with the approach of the courts to the legal concepts used in financial transactions, as well as those interested in the conceptual taxonomy of the common law.
 

Leonard v.B. Sutton Colloquium - Panopto Video Presentation Software

Leonard v.B. Sutton Colloquium — 48th Annual Conference on International Law
As a guiding international law principle with significant normative value, Sustainable Development has captured the world’s attention. The Sustainable Development Goals, which the United Nations General Assembly will adopt at the current session include ending poverty, protecting the planet, enabling access to sustainable energy and ensuring prosperity for all. This year’s Leonard v.B. Sutton Colloquium brings together leading experts to discuss the challenges international community will face in realizing the Sustainable Development Goals, especially sustainable energy. Leading scholars will present their academic work on the Sustainable Development & Sustainable Energy. Panels will address: The challenge of access to energy for 2.8 or so billion people globally and how the unmet needs of the energy poor might be satisfied; The processes of unconventional oil and gas exploitation transforming the world economy, rendering irrelevant traditional energy thinking; and unleashing a host of new problems and potential opportunities; And how even renewable energy sources, which do not involve explosive risks or produce emissions or toxic wastes, have met with resistance because of aesthetic, religious, or cultural concerns.
 

Conversations on the current refugee crisis - Panopto Video Presentation Software

More Knowledge and Less Fear. Conversations on the current refugee crisis.
Between January and July 2015, 340 000 people crossed EU borders, majority of them came from Syria. They run away from civil war, conflict or political regime. Europe seems a safe haven. Human dignity is a challenging concept of the 21st century, a foundational value of the European Union and its human rights commitment under the Lisbon Treaty. Join the University College, Cork, in Ireland for this panel discussion that seeks to provide a historical background and a broad context to the current refugee crisis, including religious and racial conflict, migration, integration, dialogue (or the lack of it), and human rights.
 

2015 UCLA Law Review Fall Conference - Panopto Video Presentation Software

UCLA Law Review Fall Conference — “Defining the Boundaries of Insider Trading”
In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, federal prosecutors and the S.E.C. successfully brought dozens of insider trading cases in what is the most significant period of insider trading enforcement since the passage of the federal securities laws. This conference convenes leading practitioners and academics to assess these prosecutions and their impact on the law of insider trading. Panels discuss insider trading enforcement in light of its implications for the future of insider trading doctrine, corporate compliance, and academic theories of insider trading. In bringing together leading experts on insider trading, the conference organizers hope to help generate ideas and scholarship that will aid courts and policymakers in defining the scope of the prohibition of insider trading.
 

Solar Power - Panopto Video Presentation Software

Solar Power: Powerful. Loved. Full of Possibility.
Join Lower Columbia University for this latest edition of the school’s series of Community Conversations. During the 2015 Fall Quarter, LCC is cultivating stimulating conversations about jobs and the environment by industry leaders and LCC faculty. This week, hear from Doug Boleyn of the Solar Oregon Board of Directors and Cascade Solar Consulting and find out what it’s really like to work in the solar energy industry.
 

Try It For Yourself

Panopto makes it easy for anyone, anywhere to record presentations and share them online, both as live streaming webcasts and recorded on-demand video. To see how Panopto can help you share your ideas, contact our team for a free trial today.

The post This Week In Ideas Shared With Panopto — October 16, 2015 appeared first on .


3 Ways to Cultivate a Culture of Social Learning

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Social learning empowers employees to think about learning in a whole new way — to share what they know and to learn from their peers on a regular basis.

To date, social learning has been a largely untapped resource for corporate learning and development. But with the advent of straightforward tools for video creation and sharing, that’s all changing. L&D professionals finally have a way to capture and curate deep knowledge across a wide range of subjects.

Naturally organized into relevant topics, searchable via an enterprise video platform, and accessible on-demand to support interval reinforcement, social learning video helps employees learn exactly the what they need, exactly when they need it.

Once a video platform has been deployed and the learning initiatives have been identified, the final, and most critical, step in a social learning program is to build a culture that encourages employees to share what they know.

Knowledge sharing with video will be new to most employees. As a result, they’ll need leadership by example and permission to experiment. Below are three specific tips for building a culture of social learning.

Get leadership to lead the way in social learning

One of the fastest ways to get people on board any initiative is to have company leaders on board too. And what better way to let employees know than to have the executives record and share their own videos?

While keystone events like product launches and shareholder meetings are excellent opportunities to share executive facetime with employees, so too are informal moments, recorded right from their office. These recordings can also do wonders for organizational transparency, enabling leaders to share as appropriate the logic that underpins the corporate strategy and the data that comprises the quarterly numbers.

Panopto Video Platform - Executive Communications with Video

 

Minimize hurdles for content producers

While some companies pursue social learning with tight approval workflows in place, most find that empowering employees to make smart decisions about what they post is an effective policy that will generate better response for the program.

Armed with a few common sense guidelines and a handful of examples, the vast majority of employees will self-regulate. After all, no one wants to look foolish or violate company policy. Short approval cycles can always be instituted where necessary.

Focus on content, not production value

Social learning videos need not look like they were produced in Hollywood. Having an enthusiastic presenter coming through with clear audio is more than enough to get started, and people will improve with practice. Most companies don’t want departments spending money for high-end cameras on every desk, or on payroll required for an employee to refine a video until aesthetically perfect.

Bottom line — don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

 

Don’t miss out!ICON - CTA - How to Build a Social Learning Program with Video

In our newest white paper, How to Build a Social Learning Program with Video, you’ll learn how your organization can embrace social learning, you’ll discover 6 ideas for getting started, and you’ll gain an understanding of how an enterprise video platform can provide the technology foundation to your social learning program.

Download your copy today.

 

The post 3 Ways to Cultivate a Culture of Social Learning appeared first on .

Assessing the Success of Your Flipped Classroom — and Planning for Next Semester

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As with any new teaching model, a switch to the flipped classroom will generate a healthy amount of interest and excitement. At the end of the semester, instructors will have a wealth of new data, opinions, and ideas with which to move from a first-flip pilot to full-time flipping — and perhaps even to an institution-wide deployment.

As you complete your first semester, plan to take some time to evaluate how the pilot impacted the tone and tenor of your class’s regular sessions, the final marks your students earned, and how the whole new process worked for you as an instructor.
 

Evaluate the impact on student performance

For most, the deciding measure of the success of a flipped classroom (or any new methodology) is its impact on students’ grades. In study after study, the flipped classroom has been a resounding success when it comes to exam grades, but each instructor and school will want to determine what success looks like to them. That will require digging into some data.

Flipped Classroom SuccessOf course, final course and exam grades are simple metrics for measuring student success, but without anything to compare them to, it can be difficult to tell whether the new pedagogy or some other factor was responsible for a change.

To get a better picture, check how student grades track over the course of the semester. As students gain familiarity with the system and better understand what is expected of them, they will exhibit more confidence, engage more enthusiastically in the active learning component, and learn to unlock the resources at their fingertips.

Comparing weekly metrics, like video consumption, online checks for understanding, or participation in class against performance on exams can help instructors understand how students adjust their behavior after a few exams.

For instructors who teach multiple sections of the same class in a given semester, consider using one class as a control and in another, try out the flipped classroom. Since the content will be roughly the same, it is an opportunity to do a side-by-side comparison to generate a tighter feedback loop for your classroom and your department.
 

Gather student and parent feedback

Grades may give instructors quantitative data on student performance, but don’t be too quick to judge a new teaching style’s success based solely by a letter. Student evaluations are likely to offer instructors insights that analytics never would.

Especially in the early goings, it’s a good idea to use a few minutes of class time to interact with students on a two-way basis, searching out potential lingering concerns and challenges with the flipped classroom format. With a little understanding, you can help to remedy any issues long before it comes time to complete report cards.

In the K12 setting, parents will also likely be eager to express their opinions about the flipped classroom. For the most engaged parents, the flipped classroom will have provided them a new level of connection to their student’s semester. Parents will either find themselves receiving fewer requests for help with assignments (since they were completed during class time), or that their ability to review the pre-class lectures gave them a much-needed refresher on how to help their child.

Assess the performance of your flipped classroom with a mix of qualitative and quantitative indicators. And don’t forget, once you’ve made your evaluation, share your findings! If you are one of those educators leading the way, there will be others who want to follow. Joining the larger community of flipped educators can be an exciting moment.

When it comes to flipping a classroom, you can play a major role in shaping student, parent and administrator perceptions about this new approach to learning. By being proactive in your communications, planning for implementation needs, listening to feedback, reviewing the analytics, and continually improving the process, you can make the most of your semester, and more importantly, make a real difference in your students’ learning.
 

Find out more!

ICON - CTA - Practical Guide to Flipping Your Classroom eBookWhile every flipped classroom is a little bit different, the goal is always the same: interactive, student-centered learning. To achieve that, flipped classroom time can take many forms, including small group labs, discussions, and problem solving time, further exploration of the lesson as a group, students presenting and receiving feedback from their peers, or simply time given to complete individual assignments with an opportunity to work more closely with the teacher.

Interested in joining teachers from around the country at the forefront of the flipped classroom pedagogy? We’ve prepared a comprehensive guide to preparing, delivering, and evaluating your flipped classroom, from ideas for interactive classroom activities to the tech needed to produce recorded lessons. Download your free copy today.

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Reflections on the Panopto Annual Conference 2015: ‘The Future of Video For Learning’

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Last week we hosted our seventh Panopto Conference for the EMEA region. The conference – now an annual fixture in the calendar – first began as a forum to help our users share best practice on lecture capture, the flipped classroom and more. While the conference still retains a strong ‘user community’ feel, it’s now open to anyone in the education sector who wants to discuss new ways to use video to enhance the student experience. The event has grown rapidly, and this year we were delighted that over 200 delegates representing 90 separate organisations registered to attend. The delegates came from a more diverse range of countries than ever before – with representatives from Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Ireland, Latvia, Turkey, Germany, and of course, the UK, in attendance.

As the overall theme of the event was ‘the future of video for learning’, I kicked off the morning sessions with a look at some of the predictions for the future for higher education and technology that I’ve seen during my 30 years in the education sector. Some, inevitably, proved accurate, while others – notably, the death of the printed book – fell wide of the mark.

My introduction was designed to highlight some important themes that would recur throughout the rest of the day. One such theme was the importance of blended learning – a theme that was explored more thoroughly during the opening keynote from Graham Brown-Martin, which included some thought-provoking observations on digital/physical crossover and on the role of the 21st century university in preparing students for a future full of uncertainties and challenges. Illustrated with quotes and video clips from thinkers such as Seth Godin, Keri Facer and Noam Chomsky, Graham dived right into some big questions. These included – what is university for? Enlightenment or indoctrination? The next stop on the conveyor belt after school? He also posed the question, now that the internet has removed the scarcity value of the lecture, is the value of higher education more about who you sit next to and proving you graduated? Graham also highlighted that good lecturing is a craft that can’t be replaced by videos or even AI, and that technology needs to enable transformation, not just reinforce 19th Century methods of teaching. Graham concluded that “lecturers will not be replaced by technology, but agile lecturers who use technology will replace those who don’t.”

Panopto Conference 2015 Student PanelA moment from the student panel

 

Following on from the keynote, we then welcomed Simon Eder from youth market research specialists Voxburner, who put a different twist on the idea of blended learning by presenting research on student views of the balance (or blend) between formal and informal learning approaches and, of course, their views on technology for learning. While many nuanced points emerged, there were also broader patterns. For instance, 84% of the 500 students surveyed agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘technology improves my ability to learn’. Video emerged as a key learning medium, with 72% of students saying that they had used an online video platform such as YouTube or Vimeo to acquire knowledge or teach themselves a new skill. The research – commissioned specifically for the event – also asked students questions like ‘what technology could you not live without?’ and ‘what is the one thing your university could do technology-wise to enhance your learning experience?’. We will be releasing some of the further findings on this blog in the coming weeks – so watch this space!

After seeing these broader student trends, we were then joined by students from Newcastle University, the University of West London and the University of Chichester who talked about their experiences of using video directly – some having had access to on-demand lectures and one student having had a module delivered using the flipped classroom methodology. The students all agreed that having access to recorded lectures didn’t have a noticeable effect on lecture attendance, but the panel had more diverse views on whether, for example, it made a difference to have recordings that included video, audio, slides and screen capture, or whether just audio synced with slides was enough for effective engagement with the content. It was a great reminder that different approaches work for different types of learners. All agreed that engaging with course content in more than one type of way was great for knowledge retention and understanding.

Panopto Conference 2015 Academic PanelA moment from the academic panel

 

As a counterpoint to the student view, we then moved to an academic panel, featuring Jennie White from the University of Chichester, Ann Draycott from the University of Derby and Dr Martin Khechara from the University of Wolverhampton. Each academic has used video in a range of ways – Jennie, for instance, to flip the classroom; Ann to offer video feedback on student work and create video tutorials; and Martin to unpack assessment and assignment briefs, create tutorials and more. They discussed how they were making video work for them in practice as well as how they were encouraging colleagues to use technology more actively in the classroom.

The last morning session saw a presentation from Panopto’s co-founder and CEO Eric Burns. His presentation: ‘Strategy, Serendipity, and Surprises’ took a look at the past fifteen years – from the very beginnings of the Carnegie Mellon University project that would later become to Panopto, right up to the present day – to consider what we correctly anticipated technology-wise and conversely what took us (and others in the sector) by surprise. He then rounded off with some predictions about potential futures for video-based learning in the education sector.

Panopto Conference 2015 - Eric BurnsPanopto CEO Eric Burns presenting

 

The afternoon saw delegates split into two parallel sessions – one more focused on technical or product-related content, the other more on teaching and learning or use cases at customer universities. The more technically-oriented sessions included a look back at product development since the last conference, along with sneak-peek demos of features coming up in the next release. It also saw the return of the ever popular ‘Ask the Experts/Tell the Experts’ session – where delegates engage in open Q&A with senior members of the Panopto team (including CEO Eric Burns). The technical sessions were brought to a close by the University of Essex’s Ben Steeples, who covered how the university has used Panopto’s API to scale lecture capture campus-wide and facilitate a specialist medical recording set-up for their nursing students.

In the other room, delegates heard from three institutions on how they are using Panopto to enhance teaching and learning at their universities. Rob Higson and Ann Draycott from the University of Derby gave a deep-dive on how they use Panopto to enhance the learning experience for BA Hons Fashion students – namely through the Flexible Feedback Project. This was then followed by Gemma Witton and Matthew Green from the University of Wolverhampton talking about how they are capturing content for science subjects in the university’s brand new Science Centre, which has reimagined the idea of the ‘learning space’ for science and integrated technology throughout. Finally, having heard a lot about youth trends and the school leaver experience throughout the day, Damien Darcy from Birkbeck College, University of London, gave us a different perspective – that of the mature student or non-traditional learner. He addressed many of the myths that surround both their use of technology for study purposes and their expectations.

As the formal sessions drew to a close, it was inspirational to reflect on all the different ways the solution is now being used by our customers. While lecture capture is, of course, still a core use case for over 90% of our customers, we’ve seen a massive rise in other video uses – from the flipped classroom to video feedback and from staff training to video assignments submitted by students themselves. When I think about what the future of video for learning holds, that future is increasingly diverse and will be tailored more and more towards the teaching and learning approaches that most engage the students institutions are trying to reach.

Want to start using video at your educational institution? Contact our team today for a free 30 day trial of Panopto.

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The Commencement Challenge: Could Kettering Live Stream Graduation on 2 Weeks’ Notice?

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Just two weeks before spring graduation in 2015, Christine Wallace, Vice President for Kettering Global Campus at Kettering University, received a late night text message from the university’s president, Robert McMahan:

“Stream commencement. Why or why not?”

Among all university activities, commencement stands apart as an event of particular significance. Graduation is planned to be a galvanizing moment, helping students feel bonded to the university for years to come as proud alumni.

Yet as Kettering was realizing, a traditional on-location event simply couldn’t serve their geographically expanding audience. Travel costs and logistical issues would make attending impossible for many online and remote students. Physical distance would also make it difficult for some parents to see their graduate cross the stage with diploma in hand.

And so at Kettering, the challenge was set.

As the team that had already been charged with streaming Kettering’s courses online for students around the world, the Global Campus team was the natural recipient for the president’s inquiry. Immediately, Dr Wallace and senior technologist Brian Beck set out to work on a solution.

With only two weeks to prepare, the Kettering team made the decision to produce and stream the spring commencement event in-house, without bringing on any outside AV specialists. Under normal circumstances, this would have been a high-risk operation. However, Kettering had already been using the Panopto video platform to deliver recorded classroom content, and the Global Campus team was confident they’d be able to use Panopto to capture and stream the graduation ceremonies.


Kettering streams Spring 2015 Commencement live worldwide with Panopto

 

Live Streaming a Marquee Event With Two Weeks’ Notice

To make sure they’d have every angle covered, the team rented a small number of high-definition camcorders, a source switcher, and a mixer for the event. They plugged everything into a standard desktop PC with the Panopto recorder installed and conducted a series of dry runs. Everything worked just as they’d hoped.

“The day of the ceremony was an absolute whirlwind,” Beck recalled. “But through it all, we were never worried about Panopto.”

Virtual attendees tuned-in through the university’s website, where they could launch a real-time stream of the graduation festivities. Although the short turnaround time had limited the team’s ability to promote the live feed, the online audience only grew as the ceremony proceeded, eventually accounting for 25% of total attendance. Said Dr Wallace, “Everything went so smoothly. It was pretty amazing.”

The Global Campus team also used the feed to share the day’s activities campus-wide, connecting Panopto to Kettering’s own digital signage system and making the event available to students, faculty, and visitors at the university that weren’t able to attend in person.

Praise for the webcast poured in. For families around the world, watching graduation in real time online brought parents, grandparents, and siblings closer to their loved ones’ big day.

“We heard from one graduate student whose parents were in Jamaica and could not afford to fly to Michigan for commencement,” reported Dr Wallace. “They were absolutely thrilled to be able to see and participate in his graduation.”

Find Out More

ICON CTA - Kettering - Panopto Video Platform Case StudyChallenged to find new ways to enhance their students’ university experience, Kettering found an opportunity to expand how the school had been using its existing lecture capture platform.

Learn more about how Kettering is using video to better serve the needs of its students and their families — click to get your copy of our newest case study today.

 

The post The Commencement Challenge: Could Kettering Live Stream Graduation on 2 Weeks’ Notice? appeared first on .

70:20:10 and the Reality of Learning in Today’s Organizations

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From perhaps the very dawn of cooperative human work, people have traded insights and shared wisdom with each other as a means to educate individuals and improve as a collective team. Today, productivity researchers have underscored the importance of this “social learning” in the 70:20:10 model, which suggests that for any position in any company, an employee will learn 10% of what they need to know via formal training, and pick up the other 90% via personal experience and the shared expertise of colleagues.

For decades, organizational learning and development teams have sought to tap into the potential of that 90%, to capture, curate, and share the deep knowledge distributed across the minds of every employee in their organization. Toward this effort, one-to-many communication tools, like enterprise social networks, have begun to allow simple exchanges of information between team members, while “brown bag” employee presentations and Wiki knowledge bases have attempted to document complex knowledge.

Though each represented real improvements, none of these solutions have offered the silver bullet to make social learning a reality. None appears to be a working alternative to walking down the hall and asking the expert for an answer in plain terms.

Yet while text and events have come up short, another solution may already be close at hand — so close, in fact, many employee development teams already put it to work every day.

SocialLearningPresentationFor social learning, how you share may be even more important than what you share. Video preserves information traded informally, for everyone to benefit from.
 

Increasingly, L&D professionals have recognized video to be a flexible, engaging medium that supports and scales classroom and conference materials, helping to extend training initiatives to more team members while reducing the cost per employee of traditional training activities. While in the past video was a complicated affair requiring specialized hardware and dedicated AV experts, today the medium has evolved to make it easy to capture information both simple and complex. Whether trading newly discovered best practices, or documenting a career’s worth of institutional knowledge, and with the ability to capture everything from a narrated screen capture or a complex multi-camera demonstration, recorded video is the one-to-many, on-demand social learning solution that bears the fidelity and bandwidth of personalized instruction.

The buzz around organizational social learning has never been more enthusiastic. Curating, preserving, and sharing the institutional knowledge of your employees offers the opportunity to radically reshape how your employees approach their jobs. With a library close at hand filled with all the little details that make your business work, employees can be more efficient in their daily work, better informed in their planning, and more strategic in their attempts to innovate.
 

Iteration bests innovation: Why the research backs social learning

In research out of Indiana University, a team of cognitive scientists discovered something unexpected. In experiments designed to assess the most efficient means of solving problems, it was those people who observed and imitated others, not those who were tasked to individually innovate, who got better results. The study’s co-author, Thomas Wisdom, explained that “imitators often make their own improvements to the original solution, and these can, in turn, be adopted and improved upon by the originator and others.”

That is to say, those waiting for a “eureka” moment were passed by time and again by those who were given a means to observe and improve.

At most organizations, people are finding new ways to be more productive every day. A front-line employee finds a way to expedite a service or offer an upsell. An analyst creates a short macro to speed up work in Excel. A member of the sales team stumbles on a new pitch that really clicks with buyers. These aren’t acts of pure creative epiphany so much as they are subtle iterations, natural responses to everyday observations that, much like evolution itself, may provide point of competitive differentiation (big or small) that can help move the business forward.

The key to turning these small-scale improvements into organizational best practices — the kind that become competitive advantages — is how effectively your people can help their colleagues understand those new ideas, methods, processes, and systems.
 

Social learning in a corporate context. How does it differ from knowledge management?

Knowledge management and social learning are two sides of the same coin — both are concerned with enabling employees to share information critical to their work, and enabling organizations to preserve those ideas as an internal resource. It’s how the two practices go about enabling the exchange of those insights that sets them apart.

Corporate Social Learning: Defined
In the modern learning environment, “social learning” refers to the decentralized, “grassroots” exchange of tips, ideas, and best practices between colleagues. This informal, “bottom-up” practice of social learning has existed for as long as people have worked side-by-side, trading pointers to help everyone succeed.

Until recently, however, that knowledge was an impossible resource to tap on-demand. If the expert wasn’t available — stuck in a meeting, gone for the day, or no longer with the company — their co-workers were forced to either find another resource or simply do without.

What has transformed enterprise social learning into a full-fledged business practice today isn’t any new change in training strategy or estimated value, it’s improved technology. At first with message boards, blogs, and wikis. Now, with flexible video platforms and enterprise social networks, companies can enable their employees to document and share their knowledge at anytime and from anywhere. Not only do these tools make it easier for experts to share, they make it simple for their employers to save — preserving institutional knowledge, even after the expert has left.

Knowledge Management: Defined
Whereas the practice of social learning has evolved as a managed form of informal learning, the practice of knowledge management started in the other direction, as a top-down technique dedicated to seeking out and preserving high-priority institutional knowledge.

Knowledge management was born with an executive mandate to learning and development teams: figure out what’s essential for employees to know and then make sure it’s documented. Behind this charge, a host of supporting tools and dedicated specialists sprung up, all ready to capture those details that, collectively, make up an organization’s competitive edge.
 

Social learning picks up where knowledge management leaves off

The emergence of social learning owes a credit to many factors, but perhaps none quite so much as the rising recognition of the value of crowdsourcing. Coined by Wired Magazine in the early 2000s, crowdsourcing was a recognition that the collective intelligence of a large community nearly always better over even the best insights of a single expert.

For organizations, the potential of crowdsourcing has found an invaluable role as social learning. Whereas knowledge management required a small and dedicated team to ascertain which knowledge might be essential to preserve, social learning throws open the doors to any employee to decide what expertise they feel is important to share. The result is the potential to create a researchable reference of institutional knowledge that’s both wider and deeper than was ever possible with traditional knowledge management. And because more ideas are shared there, more employees will be inclined to utilize the resource — creating a virtuous cycle that aids in adoption.

In an era where almost every employee is a subject matter expert in something, the practice of social learning is enabling organizations to preserve all that knowledge, help others in the organization learn more and faster, and in turn, speed up the ongoing evolution driving their business forward.

Through video, recorded from an employee’s desk or workstation, and shared within the organization through an enterprise video platform, social learning programs can produce far more knowledge for a company’s workforce in a way that is inexpensive to deliver, easy to create, and available on-demand for employees to watch as many times as necessary.

Keep reading!
ICON - CTA - How to Build a Social Learning Program with VideoIn our newest white paper, How to Build a Social Learning Program with Video, you’ll learn how your organization can embrace social learning, you’ll discover 6 ideas for getting started, and you’ll gain an understanding of how an enterprise video platform can provide the technology foundation to your social learning program.

Download your copy today.

The post 70:20:10 and the Reality of Learning in Today’s Organizations appeared first on .

From DVD Lectures to Shorter, More Focused Interactions with Students

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Shortly before spring graduation in 2015, Christine Wallace, Vice President for Kettering Global Campus, received a late night text message from the university’s president: “Stream commencement. Why or why not?”

As the team charged with streaming Kettering’s courses online for students around the world, Global Campus was the natural recipient for the president’s inquiry. They immediately set out to work on a solution.

With only two weeks to prepare, the Kettering team made the decision to produce and stream the spring commencement event in-house, without bringing on any outside AV specialists. Under normal circumstances, this would have been a high-risk operation. However, Kettering had already been using the Panopto video platform to deliver recorded classroom content, and the Global Campus team was confident they’d be able to use Panopto to capture and stream the graduation ceremonies.

Kettering University
 

Distance Learning with Video: Kettering University’s Foundation For Success

Kettering University Lecture Capture - Panopto Video PlatformWell before the commencement, Kettering had already found a valuable application for live-streamed video. The university used Panopto to deliver the university’s distance learning courses to students around the globe.

“Our team’s experience and comfort with Panopto made it easy to broadcast the 2015 commencement and ensure that the online event was successful,” said Dr Wallace.

Prior to using Panopto, the team had enabled distance learning by mailing long-form lecture recordings on DVDs to remote students. With Panopto, there was no longer a need for the costs and logistical hassles associated with the creation and shipping of physical media.
 

Kettering Changes the Way It Thinks About Delivering Campus Events and Online Education

Within six months, the team at Kettering had uploaded more than 100 courses to Panopto. Panopto’s video platform automatically optimized each lecture recording so that students around the world could watch it in the highest quality on any device, regardless of their internet connection speed.

After enhancing its existing distance learning program, the Kettering team found that they could also tap Panopto to address another challenge: enabling instructors to teach remotely.

With no more than a laptop, webcam, and Panopto’s recording software, Kettering’s faculty can now teach from anywhere in the world, and teachers have been quick to seize the opportunity. This semester, one of Kettering’s faculty will begin producing his lectures from Spain. And since Panopto automatically uploads each new video to a centralized “campus YouTube”, the Global Campus team knows they can always step in to support faculty with editing and publishing, regardless of many time zones separate them from one another.
 

Looking To The Future

As the need for specialized engineering education grows, Kettering University continues to expand their global reach, educating students at a distance and helping the entire campus community — digital or traditional — connect and celebrate milestone moments.

After having successfully delivered traditional, long-form lecture content with Panopto to students worldwide, Kettering is re-designing their online curriculum to better suit the needs of today’s students.

“Today we’re going from delivering hours and hours of DVD lectures to developing shorter, more focused interactions with students,” notes Dr Wallace.

With video on-demand, classroom scheduling no longer mandates the format of educational content. Instead, faculty are creating lecture videos that break along concept lines, and are including more multimedia content, demonstrations, and walkthroughs embedded inside the recordings. Leveraging Panopto’s timestamped notes, comments, and ratings features, students in Kettering’s classes are able to discuss the content with one another asynchronously.

By delivering video content to students and family members around the world in real time, Kettering is leading the way in not only helping reduce the barriers to education, but also to helping global students feel like valued members of the campus community.
 

Find Out More

ICON CTA - Kettering - Panopto Video Platform Case StudyChallenged to find new ways to enhance their students’ university experience, Kettering found an opportunity to expand how the school had been using its existing lecture capture platform.

Learn more about how Kettering is using video to better serve the needs of its students and their families — click to get your copy of our newest case study today.

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How Siemens Captured a 3-Day Conference — Using Only Laptops, Webcams, and Panopto

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Not long ago, more than 800 people gathered in Madrid, Spain, guests of Siemens PLM Software. The event: an internal conference designed to deliver expert knowledge sharing and hands-on technical training.

For two and a half days employees attended intensive sessions focused on building skill sets, sharing best practices and increasing detailed technical understanding of the full potential of the company’s industry-leading product lifecycle management software options.

And starting just one week later, hundreds of people who weren’t in Madrid attended the sessions as well.

The Challenge: Capturing a large internal conference on video and sharing quickly
The Solution: An all-in-one software-based service for video recording, editing, organizing and sharing
The Result: A complete library of conference videos ready just one week after the event

While hosting 800 people is no small feat, that’s just a fraction of Siemens’ worldwide staff. Realizing that many of the employees that weren’t able to join the conference could benefit from the kind of knowledge shared there, event planners came up with a strategy for recording and sharing the entire conference.

Over three days and across 8 rooms the team recorded and captured 35 speakers and in more than 30 event sessions.

And they did it using only standard webcams, USB microphones, the presenters’ own laptops . . . and Panopto.

Just to be safe, the team brought in their own camcorders as a backup measure. Then they waited for the result. None of the camcorder videos were ever used; the webcams worked.

Here, we tell you how.

Siemens Case Study Banner - Panopto Video PlatformDownload your copy of our Siemens PLM Panopto Case Study today!
 

The Challenge

First, though, a little background.

While planning their big employee conference in Madrid, Siemens faced a common challenge: how to preserve their valuable presentations in a manner that would be both timely and cost-effective.

Past experience proved this was no small problem. The traditional event recording process presented a number of problems, chiefly:

  • Expensive personnel and equipment. Event planners had to budget for professional AV consultants and videographers as well as numerous microphones, camcorders and other expensive hardware.
  • Complex, labor-intensive execution. Even the professional AV consultants sometimes struggled with capturing multiple concurrent sessions—and with adhering to tight schedules. Equipment setup was time-consuming, as was the process of uploading the videos into the editing software after they were recorded.
  • Slow delivery of final product. Once captured, videos still had to undergo multiple rounds of lengthy post-production editing before they could be seen or shared.

Due to these persistent problems, Siemens’ conference planners forecast that recreating their conference digitally would take 200 hours of work, and wouldn’t be ready for 30 to 45 days after the event.

And so, the team decided to try something different this time.

They used Panopto instead.

Siemens Quick Facts - Panopto Video PlatformSiemens’ conference was a big one. Even so, the team was able to record and share everything with just a few laptops, webcams, and Panopto.
 

The Solution

It wasn’t a difficult decision. The Siemens PLM Software Learning & Development team had already been using a small Panopto implementation to help enable the company’s video-based training and onboarding.

With the endorsement of the Learning & Development team, Siemens looked to see what else Panopto could do. And that’s when they began to see how Panopto could help them overcome all three of their event video challenges, too.

Panopto can be installed quickly and easily on any laptop. The software automatically recognizes video and audio recording devices from USB webcams to HDMI video cameras, so anyone can use it anywhere—with just about any device and with minimal setup.

Panopto can record multiple video streams with just one click, then automatically takes care of syncing, encoding, and uploading the video to a secure, searchable video library. Presenters just click “record”, present, click “stop”—and Panopto does the rest.

With Panopto, the conference hosts would be able to serve as their own AV team, recording both the speakers and their accompanying presentation materials themselves. Immediately following the sessions, Panopto would automatically upload everything to Siemens’ video content management system (VCMS). The videos could then be edited using Panopto’s web-based video editor.

After that, it would just be a matter of telling the rest of their employees they were there.

The Process

Siemens and Panopto partnered on a three-step, “ready-set-go” plan for implementation.

Ready | Pre-Event Setup
Since none of the 35 presenters were familiar with Panopto, Siemens and Panopto worked together to get everyone ready. Presenters were given a short video instructing them how to download Panopto and connect to the Siemens video library. Presenter preparation was intentionally kept brief to encourage adoption and allow speakers to focus on their sessions.

While Siemens planned on recording with webcams the Learning & Development team already had, an audio solution for 8 rooms was needed. Siemens and Panopto jointly identified and tested USB microphones, and Siemens purchased 10 Blue Yeti USB microphones for the event.

Set | Presentation Days
Recording a conference designed for 800 attendees presents more than a few challenges. For Siemens, those challenges came down to how to best capture two very different environments: large plenary sessions in the main hall, and smaller, scattered concurrent breakout sessions.

For the main sessions, Siemens opted to capture the “big-picture” view. Video and audio for the stage were recorded with a single stage webcam. Speakers’ PowerPoint® slides were added and synchronized in post-production editing with Panopto.

For the breakout sessions, the challenge was set-up time. Each room had to be wired with the Yeti microphone (and the back-up camcorders). Presenters were recorded using their own laptops, each requiring about 3-5 minutes to set up—with only 10 minutes available between sessions.

Despite the lack of experience with Panopto, Siemens successfully recorded all but two rooms in the first round of sessions and from then on saw every session captured in full. Set-up speed improved in each cycle, falling to 2-3 minutes per room by the end of the conference.

Go | Post-Presentation
After the presenters recorded their own sessions, all that was left was to upload the videos to Siemens’ Panopto video library. Although Panopto typically does this automatically, wifi at the conference location was inconsistent and event organizers had opted to record most sessions offline.

With a quick reminder email Siemens saw most presenters upload their recorded sessions right away. No Panopto recordings were lost, and Siemens experienced 100% file transfer success.

Within a week of the conference’s close, the Siemens PLM team had reviewed, edited and shared all of the uploaded sessions.

The plan worked.

Siemens recorded a complete 3-day conference, with individual presentations from 35 speakers across more than 30 sessions, and made the whole thing available to their worldwide workforce in one week’s time.

And they did it with just a handful of standard webcams, their presenters’ own laptops, and Panopto.

The Results

For Siemens PLM, the results were ideal.

First and foremost, they’d created a library of more than 30 original, high-quality videos, all with notes, slides, and indexed content, and all captured perfectly.

And they were timely. The Siemens team had successfully recorded, uploaded, edited and organized all of the videos within a week of the conference’s close. Employees unable to attend in person saw it all just a week later — instead of a month and a half after the fact.

And they were searchable! In the weeks that followed, Siemens found that Panopto even made it easy to search inside the event videos. Employees who hadn’t attended could quickly find not only the sessions that interested them, but the exact moments within the sessions that spoke to their interest. Those who had attended meanwhile were able to review their favorite moments.

Best of all was the savings. The old process—which would have required 200 hours of contract work by technical specialists, not to mention almost a dozen thousand-dollar HD camcorders and supporting equipment—was typically a significant part of Siemens’ budget for each event.

Panopto eliminated the need for all of that—all while producing better quality videos and with no new hardware, no technical consultants, and no specialized training.

The Conclusion

“Panopto was the only means to record and capture this large of an event on a timely basis with minimum Learning & Development project hours expended,” wrote Thomas P. Doyle, Director of Curriculum Development at Siemens PLM Software.

Indeed, the Siemens Madrid conference was a success—and so were the successive Madrid conferences held online. Shortly after the videos were made available they had been viewed more than 500 times by more than 200 Siemens employees—and counting.

What started out as a tool for the Learning & Development team spread to the Events team and throughout the company, and today Siemens PLM Software is scaling up Panopto enterprise video deployment.

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Empowering Colleagues to Teach Each Other

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90% of everything every employee in an organization learns isn’t taught in formal training. It’s gleaned through informal advice given by SEMs, serendipitous observations of colleagues’ more efficient techniques, and systematic trial and error. Often the know-how and skills acquired and shared via this “social learning” are an organization’s most essential — detailed understandings of how specific processes really work, or how specific tools can be used most efficiently.

The granular, role-specific nature of this informal skills training, however, is also why it’s historically been impractical for formal L&D teams to produce. Social technologies have sought to change that, but early text-centric solutions fizzled as employees were loath to write.

Solving that challenge, however, is a familiar technology in a new role: video.

SocialLearningwithTania - Panopto Video PlatformVideo helps make subject matter experts’ insights easy to repeat and share anywhere.
 

Quick to record, easy to follow along, and inexpensive to curate and manage, video is helping organizations capture, preserve, and share more of their institutional knowledge — and in turn, speeding up employee onboarding, reducing time and expense wasted “reinventing the wheel,” and facilitating innovation through more efficient incremental advancements.

Context and Perspective

For most organizations, fostering informal learning won’t be completely new. Here’s what makes video-enabled social learning different from:

Knowledge Management — If knowledge management is the top-down process of discovering and preserving institutional knowledge, social learning is the other side of the coin, a bottom-up process that enables any employee to decide what expertise is important to share. This “wisdom of the crowd” approach often uncovers new and unexpected points of expertise that can then be leveraged across the organization.

Social Collaboration Tools — While a step in the right direction, most text-based internal social networks and wikis simply can’t replace the value of getting a face-to-face answer to a question from the in-house expert. Video’s combination of text, imagery, and humanity offer a better learning experience employees are more likely to actually use.
 

Visualizing the Opportunities

The value of organized social learning is in its breadth — the practice can amplify most any shared information between employees. Here are some of today’s most popular strategies:

  • Introducing employees and foster connections between subject matter experts
  • Demonstrating job-specific functions and role-specific techniques
  • Explain new product and process developments with complete visual detail
  • Sharing answers to everyday workplace questions in order to improve team efficiency
  • Recording meetings both as a training resource and past reference
  • Preserving employees expertise prior to retirement or departure

 

Identifying Challenges

As with any organizational learning program, a video social learning initiative requires some level of support, investment, and oversight. Chiefly:

Cultural Support — Employees will be looking for signs that a new initiative is supported at the top, so getting executives to participate will bolster company wide adoption. And be sure to set expectations that the company values information over appearance — social videos don’t need Hollywood-level production values, just useful know-how and expertise.

Technical Support — To facilitate social learning at scale across departments, geographies, and time, organizations need technology that makes employee-level sharing simple. AV Specialist-dependent modes of video production won’t work here, but the same enterprise video platform that may already be supporting other facets of your learning and development programs can provide a desktop-level ready solution for recording, sharing, searching, and managing social learning videos.
 

See It In Action

In this recorded presentation, Robert Morton shares information about optimizing Tableau’s analytics query performance for his colleagues to learn from.


 

Keep Reading!

ICON - CTA - How to Build a Social Learning Program with VideoIn our newest white paper, How to Build a Social Learning Program with Video, you’ll learn how your organization can embrace social learning, you’ll discover 6 ideas for getting started, and you’ll gain an understanding of how an enterprise video platform can provide the technology foundation to your social learning program.

Download your copy today.

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The Answer to Transparency Isn’t More Town Halls — It’s Technology

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An important trend has emerged from the near-constant flow of studies into what people want from their employers. There, amid the usual compensation and flex-schedule requests, is this:

Transparency.

Employees want to understand not just the specifics of their own jobs, but the bigger picture of the entire organization — from the strategic vision right down to how their role contributes.

Quint Studer, author of the Straight A Leadership: Alignment, Action, Accountability, argues “connecting the how to the why” offers several motivational benefits – helping employees understand the external environment that affects the company, allowing employees to respond to challenges more productively, and creating consistent messaging across the organization to defeat speculative, grapevine-style gossip.

This push toward internal transparency isn’t particularly new.

Ask anyone on your internal communications team and they’ll tell you they’ve been hearing the calls for increased information for some time now.

And by now at most organizations, the corporate communications team has begun sharing more and more by way of regular newsletters, scheduled roundtables, and quarterly town hall meetings.

But all that information takes time to produce — and only creates more call for increased insight into the company’s inner workings.

There is a better way.

One that leverages the work already being done to improve communications, makes it more likely to be seen and more likely to engage those who do see it. Video.

According to Forrester Research, employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than to read documents and email. Online presentation tools enable executives and corporate communications teams to record video messages that employees can view on demand, or webcast live meetings and announcements in high definition to thousands of employees, investors, or customers across the globe.

Best of all? Creating a video presentation is easy.

For messages you want employees to be able to see at their convenience — company news, internal program announcements, or other regular communications — a screen capture tool can allow you to record your presentation slides and an audio track. Panopto users can capture both their screen and their webcam (as well as additional webcams), to create a more engaging video presentation.

Video can be exceptionally efficient for executive communications. Rather than spending cycles writing and rewriting emails or asking every member of the management team to be available for town halls, executives can simply click “record”, share their message, and make it available to the team through the corporate YouTube.

Such online presentations can be formally planned and produced, but may be just as effective when done informally. The New York Stock Exchange considers informal executive communication videos to be a more personalized and effective way for its leadership to engage its workforce.

And if you still aren’t ready to replace those town halls — don’t.

Include video both as a means to live broadcast the event as it happens, and to make it available on demand in your video library for viewers who couldn’t attend in real time.

Video and online presentation tools are a simple way to amplify your internal communications, engage with more of your employees, and foster corporate transparency.

Looking for a video platform that makes online presentations easy to record, share, and search? Contact our team and try Panopto free for 30 days.

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— It’s Technology
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What’s New in Panopto 5.0?

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What’s New at a Glance

  • Any authorized user can control your Panopto rooms from smartphones or tablets
  • Panopto for Mac now supports multi-camera recording and live webcasting
  • Webcast viewers can now pause and rewind the live feed using a new DVR service
  • Panopto for Windows includes a modern UI and the ability to record system audio
  • Automated recorders support new permissions and include usability improvements
  • Subfolders are easier to navigate and manage

Today, we’re excited to announce Panopto 5.0, a significant update to our video platform. This release includes new functionality across the platform for both end users and administrators. For end users, we’re bringing live streaming and multi-camera video capture to the Mac, a new modern UI and system audio capture to Windows, Tivo-like functionality to live webcasts, and a unique capability for controlling video recordings from your mobile device. For administrators, we’ve expanded the way that you can use automated recorders — granting limited or full access to non-admin users.

To begin, let’s cover Remote Control, a new capability that will change the way both admins and end users interact with Panopto.

 

Turn Your Smartphone Into a Panopto Remote Control

More and more classrooms, lecture halls, and conference rooms are being outfitted as “Panopto rooms,” in which one or more high-quality cameras and microphones are connected to a Panopto PC or Mac. Often, these Panopto rooms are set up using our automated recording software. Their primary use is for formal presentations and lectures that are typically scheduled in advance and managed by your organization’s Panopto admin.

Ideally though, the recording and live streaming capabilities in these Panopto rooms should be available to anyone within the organization. A manager hosting a brown bag presentation in a Panopto room should be able to live webcast the presentation to coworkers around the world without assistance. An instructor should be able to capture a flipped classroom video using the high quality AV gear in a Panopto lecture hall without scheduling it in advance. An employee should be able to walk into a Panopto room for a meeting, decide that they want to capture the meeting on the spot, and start an ad hoc recording in under a minute.

These were the goals we set out to achieve when we began work on Panopto Remote Control. Remote Control turns iOS and Android devices into touch panels that can preview and control Panopto rooms. It opens new recording and webcasting opportunities to anyone in organizations that use Panopto. And it expands the ways in which Panopto administrators can set up recording workflows across their organization.

Remote Control - Room List

Remote Control turns your iOS or Android device into an AV remote

Remote Control is accessed through the Panopto Mobile apps for iOS and Android. A new tab within the apps presents a list of Panopto rooms within your organization. Tapping on any of the rooms “opens” the room, providing a preview of cameras and other video-capable devices that have been configured to work with Panopto.

At this point, starting a recording is as easy as tapping the red Record button. Panopto will begin recording all of the video feeds in the room. By default, the recording will be one hour long, and once it’s complete, it’ll automatically be uploaded to your most recently used Panopto folder.

To make changes to the recording length or the target folder on Panopto, simply tap Options and select a time and folder from the respective dropdown boxes. The Options tab also includes a Webcast checkbox. Tapping this will set Panopto to simultaneously record and live stream the video.

Remote Control - In Room Options

The Remote Control Options form

When the recording is complete, just tap the Stop button.

For admins, Remote Control introduces new ways to permission your automated recorders. Specifically, admins can now grant two levels of access to non-admin Panopto users:

  1. Record-only access, in which non-admins can record ad hoc sessions and schedule new sessions, and
  2. Full admin access, in which non-admins can record ad hoc sessions, schedule new sessions, and configure the settings and video sources on automated recorders.

These new permissions are granted by admins to individual users or groups, and are applied to individual automated recorders.

04RR_GrantAdminCreatorAccess-cropped-border

Recording and scheduling permissions can be granted to Creators

Remote Control will ship as part of an update to Panopto Mobile for iOS and Android in the coming weeks. Until then, you can test the capability at the following URL: http://[yoursitename].staging.panopto.com/Panopto/pages/mobile/remoterecorders.aspx

The Easiest Software for Live Multi-Camera Webcasting Comes to Mac OS

Live streaming video presentations, lectures, and corporate events has traditionally been a multi-step process that required the assistance of AV experts. Setting up a live webcast required an understanding of encoder settings for bitrate, frame rate, resolution, and streaming protocol. The encoder would then need to be connected and configured to work with a web server. Starting the live stream and managing Q&A during the webcast required at least one additional person. And then after the webcast, the recorded presentation would need to be edited, re-encoded, and manually uploaded to a content management system where others could access it.

At Panopto, we took a different approach to live streaming that eliminates all of the manual steps and need for AV expertise. You simply select the video sources you want to stream (webcams, screen content, document cameras, etc), click record, present, and then click stop. Panopto handles everything else automatically.

With Panopto 5.0, we’re excited to bring this live streaming capability to the Mac. Below is a screenshot of Panopto 5.0 for Mac OS:

Panopto Mac Recorder-sm

If you already use Panopto for Windows, this release of Panopto will be immediately familiar on your Mac. The user interface is laid out similarly on both platforms, and the control names and behaviors are also consistent.

To start a live stream from the Mac, simply click the Webcast checkbox once you’ve selected your video and audio sources, and then click Record.

In Panopto 5.0, you can webcast up to three feeds of video from a single Mac. Typically, this includes:

  1. A video feed of your presenter
  2. The content of their screen
  3. One additional device, such as a document camera

Of course, you can also use Panopto’s unique distributed webcasting capability to combine multiple Macs (or a combination of Macs and PCs) to create webcasts with more video feeds. We’ll cover that in greater detail in a forthcoming blog post.

All webcasts are delivered using the HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol and support adaptive bitrate streaming. The combination of HLS and adaptive bitrates ensures that your webcast

  1. Can traverse firewalls without the need to open additional ports
  2. Works with existing WAN optimization and web caching technologies
  3. Minimizes the amount of bandwidth consumed by video
  4. Minimizes buffering for viewers

 

 

Live DVR Brings Pause and Rewind to Webcasts

If you’ve ever been late to a live webcast, you’ve traditionally had two options to catch up on what you missed:

  1. IM or text someone else who’s watching and ask them what you’ve missed
  2. Wait for the webcast to become available on demand

Neither is a great option. Option 1 requires you to interrupt a colleague and results in only a brief summary. Option 2 rarely materializes, since it often takes days or weeks to post-produce a webcast and publish it for on-demand viewing.

A better option is live DVR — the same technology that TiVo popularized in the early 2000s, and that has now become an expected part of the cable and satellite television viewing experience.

DVR enables you to pause and rewind live video feeds while you’re watching them. In Panopto 5.0, we’re introducing a DVR service that works out of the box with every webcast:

09WebcastDVRRewound-frame

Pause and rewind live webcasts

So the next time you show up 15 minutes late to a town hall meeting, or you miss the first 20 minutes of your distance ed lecture, simply rewind the live feed to 0:00 and catch the beginning. From there, you can watch the video in its entirety.

Sometimes, of course, you miss the entire live event. In those situations, Panopto 5.0 brings its fast-path encoding to live events. With fast-path, your live events are encoded to multiple bitrates, recorded, and uploaded to your Panopto server on the fly. As a result, your webcast can often be published for on-demand viewing in minutes rather than the days or weeks it’s traditionally taken for manual post-production, encoding, and uploading to a content management system.
 

A Modern UI, System Audio Capture, and Multi-Bitrate Webcasts for Windows Users

For our Windows users, the most noticeable update in Panopto 5.0 is the re-skinned UI. We’ve flattened the previously beveled controls, taken a more minimalist approach to tabs, and added a bit of color and contrast to the design, which previously sported a uniformly concrete color. The result is a cleaner, more modern user experience for recording and live streaming.

11WR_Adjustments 2 with Shadow

Panopto 5.0 for Windows

Under the hood, we’ve introduced two additional features to Panopto for Windows. First, you can now capture system audio in addition to your microphone. This makes Panopto the ideal app for recording web conferences and webinars from WebEx, Skype for Business, GoToMeeting, GoTowebinar, and a range of other providers.

Second, we’ve updated how live streams are produced from your Windows desktop or laptop. In the past, webcasts were produced by default using a single bitrate. Now, all webcasts are produced using multiple bitrates. As a result, you’ll get a live viewing experience that is tailored to your available bandwidth. A faster connections gets you higher quality playback, while a slower connection will gracefully degrade to lower bitrates on the fly. What’s in it for you? Faster start times, faster seeking when using our live DVR service, and most importantly, less buffering during playback.
 

Improved Previews for Automated Recording

One of the benefits of Panopto’s automated recorders is the peace of mind that comes from previewing your video feed before and during a recording. From any browser on any network, you can log in to Panopto, see a snapshot of the primary video feed, and confirm that audio is being captured.

In previous releases, preview was limited to the primary video feed (typically the feed of the presenter). In Panopto 5.0, we’ve updated our automated recorders to provide previews of all non-screen video feeds. This means that if you have two video cameras and a document camera set up in a lecture hall, you can preview the video feeds of all three in your Panopto portal.
 

Simplified Access and Management of Subfolders

Finally, we’ve made it easier to access and create subfolders in Panopto 5.0. Specifically, when you’re looking at a list of videos in Panopto, you’ll also see the currently available subfolders just above that list. From the subfolder list, you can also add new subfolders by clicking on the Add Folder icon:

13FoldersInContentSection-cropped-framed

Simplified subfolder access and management
 

 

Get Panopto 5.0 Today

If you want to learn more about what’s new in Panopto 5.0, or find out how our video platform can help your organization capture, manage, and search video more efficiently, contact our team for a demo, or request a free trial of our software.

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2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Video Content Management

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At a glance:

  • Gartner has just released the 2015 edition of the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Video Content Management report
  • The report provides an analysis of the Enterprise VCMS market, along with profiles of key vendors in the space
  • For the second year in a row, Panopto has been recognized as a “Leader”
  • A complimentary copy of the report is available at http://info.panopto.com/gartner-2015


Official 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant GraphicGartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Video Content Management report is a benchmark. As an independent evaluation of the key vendors in the space, the report is widely recognized as one of the most influential market analyses in the video platform industry.

This week marks the release of the 2015 edition of the report. In it, we’re excited to read how Gartner views the video CMS market and where it’s headed.

Moreover, for the second year in a row, we’re honored to be recognized as a “Leader” in a market filled with impressive platforms.

If you’d like to read the full report yourself, we’re happy to offer a complimentary copy that you can download at: http://info.panopto.com/gartner-2015

Panopto’s strengths, according to Gartner

As is customary in Magic Quadrant research, Gartner highlights the key strengths of each vendor covered in the report.

In an increasingly competitive marketplace, Panopto’s video content management system was recognized for its unique video search technology, and for the strength and flexibility of its video recording and live streaming tools.

Gartner’s report also notes that in user interviews, Panopto customers repeatedly cited ease of use as a key reason why they chose Panopto.

GartnerMQ

The two most essential features of a video platform: flexibility and simplicity.

Panopto gives organizations a simple tool that brings video out of the realm of the specialist and into the hands of any employee, instructor, and student. Panopto runs on any Windows or Mac laptop, records from virtually any camera, and streams video for optimal playback on any device.

Regardless of your message or your audience, with Panopto you can record or live stream video in just two steps: press record, and then present. Our software automatically takes care of the rest — indexing for search, transcoding for playback, optimizing file size to protect your network, and more.

And as luck would have it…

Gartner’s report comes within 24 hours of our latest product update. Panopto 5.0 includes new additions and functionality across the platform. Each is designed to make recording, webcasting and managing video easier for everyone. Highlights of the release include:

  • Our new Remote Control capability, which turns your smartphone into a Panopto AV remote,
  • Recording and webcasting enhancements to our Windows and Mac recording software,
  • DVR-style pause and rewind options for live webcasts,
  • and a quite a bit more.

The evolving role of video in the workplace

Just a decade or so ago, enterprise video was a luxury. Organizations that leveraged video at all relied on AV specialists or outside agencies to produce it, and a cobbled-together collection of content management systems to share it. Companies typically used video to accomplish one of two goals — either to stream high-profile internal communications, or to record major annual events. Both required substantial budget to capture and produce.

Over the last ten years, though, video has become easier to create thanks to the inexpensive, high-quality cameras on phones, laptops, and in webcams.

At the same time, video has also become easier to share. Consumer tools like YouTube (for hosting), Facebook (for sharing), and Periscope (for webcasting) have taught everyone how to trade video content online.

And in the last few years, the enterprise video platform has brought all of those video capabilities together into a single application built for the workplace.

And it’s not a minute too soon.

Once considered an optional add-on, video has become an essential part of many business activities.

Learning and Development teams rely on video to scale training programs and reduce costs.

HR teams rely on video to streamline the employee onboarding process.

Sales teams use video to stand apart from the competition with more engaging presentations and product demonstrations.

Communications teams use video to help internal and external events reach bigger audiences.

Technology teams use video to document product and process updates, and to share best practices as social learning.

Marketing teams use video for advertising, of course, but also for webinars, explainer videos, FAQ responses, and a range of customer lifecycle and lead nurturing communications opportunities.

No single style of video dominates today. Business videos are just as likely to be webcast live as they are streamed on-demand, and may feature anything from a simple webcam-and-slides presentation to a professionally-captured multi-camera keynote.

One thing is certain, however. Video in the workplace has crossed the tipping point, and now is fast becoming a preferred medium for just about every kind of organizational communication and learning.   

Get the details.

To receive a complimentary copy of the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Video Content Management, click here: http://info.panopto.com/gartner-2015

And if you’d like to see how your company can put video to work,  Panopto’s video platform is yours to try free for a month — no contracts and no commitments. Sign up to get started.

 

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This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Panopto.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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How to Implement Accessible Lecture Capture

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Accessible-Lecture-Capture---Panopto-OLC-3PlayMedia-Webinar---Tomorrow-Version-Email-BannerIf you’ve ever woken up in a sweat about whether your campus technology is accessible,
you won’t want to miss this webinar.

For many campuses, online video has become an integral part of teaching and learning. The popularity of blended and online learning has made lecture capture in particular an essential resource for many educational institutions.

Does your lecture capture technology do enough to ensure accessibility?

While video technology has opened up the classroom to many more students, it’s also increased the pressure on colleges and universities to make their video content accessible to students and staff.

Get the latest, from those who know.

In this webinar, Christopher Soran, the Interim eLearning Director at Tacoma Community College, along with Panopto’s own Ari Bixhorn and Lily Bond from 3Play Media, will discuss how you can implement accessible lecture capture at your university.

Looking at Tacoma’s workflow, the team will walk through an efficient, cost-effective way to manage closed captioning for lecture capture at a university level, including:

  • How Tacoma Community College uses lecture capture
  • The importance of accessibility and how it concerns lecture capture
  • Benefits and legal requirements for accessible lecture capture
  • Tacoma’s approach to accessibility for eLearning

Don’t miss it!

How to Implement Accessible Lecture Capture, presented by the Online Learning Consortium, is scheduled for Thursday, December 3rd, at 2pm ET (11am PT). Registration is free.

Reserve your spot today!

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My past, present and future with video – an academic’s viewpoint

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KhecharaIf you’ve seen guest blog posts from my colleagues here and here, you’ll know that video plays a really important role in how we deliver science teaching at the University of Wolverhampton. Personally, I’m a massive advocate for using video to improve teaching and learning and, luckily for me, my own experimentation with video is matched by a push from my institution to actively use technology in the classroom to improve the experience for our students.

I’ve been working with video for learning since 2009. My interest in using video in this way initially stemmed from an institutional blended learning project I was working on at the time. Since then, I have been involved in a variety of initiatives to investigate the impact of lecture capture technologies and video for the flipped classroom. In my own time I’ve experimented with video for student feedback and for science communication and outreach – often just using an HD flipcam to capture my message.

So, why video? Well, video appeals to me on many levels. As a senior lecturer, engagement practitioner and professional science communicator, I can see the power of video as a medium for communicating concepts. It helps, of course, that I spent lots of time in front of a camera in previous occupations (I was an extreme sportsman for 10 years). This meant that I was already very aware of how video can enhance your ability to communicate with an audience – especially when practical things need to be shown. Unlike purely audio or text-based messaging, video offers the viewer access to the richly expressive nature of the human body and this helps to convey the information you want to get across much better than, say, just sound alone. Video also lends itself well to giving out information that you might need to reiterate multiple times. Our class sizes can be as big as 500 students and this means that without video we would have to deliver the same lecture over and over again, which is just not efficient use of our time as academics.

Right now, I’m using video for pretty much anything I can teaching-wise! As well as doing standard lecture capture to record important sessions, I’m also using Panopto for live webcasting, which our students love. In addition, we’re using video to give feedback on students’ assignments, along with feedback to the questions students pose when we’re ‘unpacking’ or explaining the assessment criteria for the course. In these assessment criteria sessions, students are often too shy to ask questions outright in front of the whole group, so we get them to ask their questions anonymously or raise points by writing them on post-its and sticking them to the wall as they leave. I can then summarise their concerns and feedback to them using video. In fact, these are the videos that have been used the most by our students.

Another really important use for video at Wolverhampton is to power the flipped classroom – a teaching method that we use with both undergraduate and postgraduate students. We have a whole building designed specifically around the flipped classroom approach which doesn’t have any of the conventional spaces you’d associate with traditional lectures, where the academic teaches didactically from the front of the room. Instead, we can use video to bring students up to speed with key concepts and then focus on practical implementation of these ideas in the face-to-face sessions.

This flipped classroom approach offers significant benefits for STEM subjects, which often have a large amount of didactic content that needs to be transmitted to students. While, naturally, it is important to teach students key underlying concepts, unfortunately this has often resulted in more ‘transmissive’ delivery of content by the onstage academic to a large number of passive students. This traditional lecturing model doesn’t easily allow for the development of deeper understanding – and here’s where using video to flip our classrooms has become extremely useful. We can get all the basics (which would previously have been delivered in a traditional lecture format) out of the way on the video and then spend the session checking understanding and exploring core concepts more fully. The flipped classroom also offers us the ability to give video instruction to facilitate large practical classes. The video is used to deliver the ‘method’ along with a demonstration of the activity. Students watch this and follow along. This has led to more organised sessions and is also producing students who are more adaptable as, in effect, they are helping themselves to facilitate their work instead of immediately turning to an academic for help.

The aim of all of this, of course, is to give our students the best teaching we can and they have welcomed the delivery of teaching materials via video with open arms. In fact, when there is no video they always ask: “where’s the video sir?’. Video has now become such an essential part of their learning experience that some people seem a little lost without it. I think this stems in part from the ‘just YouTube it’ attitude to learning that a lot of people have now. I know that if I need to learn about something I will typically just find an online video about it. Our students are just the same!

Some of my peers worry that delivering content via video in this way encourages students to skip the physical lecture. However, in my experience those people who like to attend will and those that don’t like to won’t – regardless of whether or not the lecture is being recorded. Independently of whether someone does or doesn’t come to the lecture, everybody seems to engage with the video content and in doing so receives the learning materials we want to give them. Does it matter if they are there in the physical session or not? Not necessarily. For those who want to engage in a different way or in a different format (for whatever reason), video just makes the session more inclusive and as an educator, I’m OK with that.

So my students love video, but what about my fellow academics? Well, it’s fair to say that here the response is more mixed. Some members of staff are all for it and accept that as the world changes, we need to embrace new technologies. Others who are perhaps more traditional in their approach or less confident in their abilities as educators can be more resistant. Some have unfounded worries that the institution might replace them with a video, while others have concerns about intellectual property. To be honest, I can’t see what the problem is – I think video is a vital tool to improve the student experience in higher education.

Coming into academia from a different kind of work background definitely meant that I approached teaching with a totally open mind and with a willingness to try any new teaching method that had good evidence to demonstrate its effectiveness. I’ve become a big fan of not just using video but also dialogic learning, gaming in teaching and self-organising learning environments. Teaching and learning is very different now compared to my own university experiences and I am very keen to embrace these changes. I think most of the concerns my colleagues may have about engaging with video could be countered pretty easily and that the benefits of video far outweigh these concerns. Of course, there will always be some teachers who can never be persuaded to integrate new technologies into their classroom, but I think those academics who adapt and embrace new things will thrive and those who don’t risk getting left behind.

As well as providing students with learning resources in a medium they can relate to, I also think video has a role to play in improving teaching standards by encouraging self-reflection by academics on their lecturing or teaching style. I regularly watch my videos for self-review purposes to iron out any issues in my delivery. I think it could be used for audit and quality control too, as it allows peer and institutional review of teaching practice.

In terms of what’s next with video for me as an academic, there are several things coming up in the near-term. Firstly, we are just finishing up a project to investigate the effectiveness of the flipped classroom when used in conjunction with other electronic tools to see if this can help raise attainment in postgraduate studies. We are particularly looking into how video can assist our international postgraduates. I’m also going to start using video for outreach and engagement with schools. In particular I’m thinking about webcasting some of our lectures so that school students can experience the lecture format for themselves as well as allowing school students to virtually join in with an undergraduate practical session or have an academic join the classroom to answer any questions they might have on a given topic. It’s my opinion that with the advances in technology these days there isn’t necessarily always a need for me to actually go to the classroom to inspire a generation. Perhaps they would prefer to talk to me through an electronic intermediary, like they do so often with their peers. I’m very interested in this sort of tele-presence approach to engagement and want to explore this more in the coming year.

Thinking a bit longer-term, I love the idea of using virtual environments more extensively – especially for teaching subjects where there is an imperative to experience the laboratory environment to develop skills. I’m also very interested in the whole maker space area, as it seems like a natural extension of SOLE classrooms and team-oriented problem-based learning. The potential for cooperative learning is massive and something that I think will become an important tool in the classroom. We can give our students content and we can give our students laboratory time but what we can’t easily give them is the adaptability and the forward-thinking skills that they will need in the advanced knowledge economy they’ll be entering when they leave university. I’m sure there will be a role for video in helping our students grow and develop in this area too – watch this space!

If you want to use video at your institution, you can contact a member of the Panopto team for a demo or request a free trial.

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Introducing Panopto Remote Control

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Summary in Five Bullets

  • Video recording equipment is being installed in more and more classrooms and conference rooms
  • Unfortunately, the equipment often goes unused because it’s too difficult to operate
  • Panopto built Remote Control to address this issue
  • With Remote Control, your smartphone becomes a touch panel for controlling in-room AV gear
  • It enables any employee to easily record meetings and live stream high quality presentations using professional AV equipment

In the last five years, smartphones have become remote controls for more and more of our stuff. We can dim our lights, set our home security system, and unlock our doors. We can navigate the programming on our Apple TV, and adjust the temperature on our Nest thermostats. We can remotely start our cars, and remotely control the flight of our quadcopters.

Our phones are the remote controls for our “Internet of Things.” So, as a company who builds an internet-connected video platform, we asked the question, Why not also make phones the remote controls for our AV systems?

Panopto Remote ControlWhy not record your next meeting or presentation from the palm of your hand?

 

The Problem with Smart Classrooms and Conference Rooms

Walk into any corporate classroom, and chances are you’ll see a digital podium at the front and some kind of video camera in the back. Meeting rooms are increasingly being outfitted with AV gear, too. Often it’s a video conferencing setup with a small camera, a screen, and some kind of mic that picks up audio from around the room. Sometimes it’s a professional AV setup with wall-mounted cameras that swivel and zoom. Other times it’s a roundtable camera sitting on the meeting room table.

Classrooms and Conference RoomsCorporate classrooms and meeting rooms are increasingly outfitted with AV equipment that goes unused due to its complexity.

The question is, how often do you actually use the gear to record your meetings or webcast your presentations? Unless you’re on the AV team or in the IT organization, the answer is probably not often. Most in-room audio-video equipment is unfortunately only used for formal events like training sessions and executive broadcasts. Why? Because it’s too hard to use without help from the AV team.
 

You Shouldn’t Need to Bother the AV Team – Introducing Panopto Remote Control

In-room AV gear should be accessible to any employee, and doesn’t have to be overly complex if it’s been properly configured and fronted by a simple user experience. That was our assertion when we set out to build a new Panopto capability called Remote Control. We announced it last week as part of Panopto 5.0, and we believe that it has the potential to change the way businesses record and live stream video.

Remote Control - Panopto Video PlatformTurn your smartphone into a touch panel for your in-room AV equipment

Remote Control turns your smartphone into a touch panel that can preview and control AV gear in classrooms and conference rooms. It brings professional-quality video recording and live streaming within reach for any employee in organizations that use Panopto.

Imagine you walk into a conference room for a brainstorming meeting. You decide to record it to make sure that all of the ideas are captured for future reference. With Remote Control, you simply launch the Panopto Mobile app on your phone, select your current meeting room, and tap the red Record button. When your meeting wraps up, tap the Stop button. In minutes, you and other meeting attendees will have access to the video on demand from a secure, centralized video portal.

What’s more is that you’ll be able to search inside the recording for any word that was spoken during the meeting. Using Panopto Smart Search, you’ll be able to find the precise moment when the word was mentioned, and fast forward to that point in the video. So with just a few taps on your phone, you will have captured an ad hoc, yet high quality, video that can be watched on any device and searched as easily as your email or documents.

What’s more is that you’ll be able to search inside the recording for any word that was spoken during the meeting. Using Panopto Smart Search, you’ll be able to find the precise moment when the word was mentioned, and fast forward to that point in the video. So with just a few taps on your phone, you will have captured an ad hoc, yet high quality, video that can be watched on any device and searched as easily as your email or documents.

Brainstorming SessionRecord every idea and insight from your next brainstorming meeting.

 

You Don’t Even Know What You’ve Been Missing

A brainstorming session is just one example of the types of meetings and presentations you’ll want to record with Remote Control. When you begin to regularly record your meetings, you’ll realize just how much more efficient it is than having an appointed scribe take notes and send a recap email after the meeting. You’ll also realize just how much you’ve been missing by not capturing and sharing all of the details and important discussion points from your meetings.

With video, your entire discussion, all of your decisions, and all of your action items are captured verbatim. They provide a historical record that can be used at future meetings to verify decisions, and to remind people of prior insights and actions.

Remote Control also makes it easy to share presentations and other information with people across your organization. For example, if you’re holding a brown bag session for employees in your Seattle office, why not record it and make it available on demand for co-workers in Chicago, London, and Shanghai?

Panopto Remote Control in HandRecord your next brown bag presentation with a few taps on your smartphone

In addition to brainstorming and brown bag sessions, here are some other examples of meetings and presentations you can record or live stream using Panopto Remote Control:

  • Product design reviews – Capture all of the feedback and decisions made about your product’s UX and architecture for members of the team to reference throughout the product development cycle.
  • Recurring status meetings – For anyone who misses a regularly-scheduled status meeting, the recordings allows them to catch up on what they missed, and what other team members are working on.
  • Webinars for your salesforce – Any time there’s an update from headquarters, such as a new product release, record it for those who can’t attend, and so that anyone in the sales force can refer back to key points that were discussed.
  • Town hall events– When executives provide monthly or quarterly updates, there are always important details about recent milestones and company strategy that can be webcast live and simultaneously recorded for on-demand playback.
  • Conference calls – Never take another note during your Skype or WebEx conference calls with partners and customers. By capturing the calls, you get a word-for-word record of everything discussed. And with the Panopto app for Salesforce, you can attach the recording to account records in Salesforce for future reference.
  • Event and PR planning meetings – Planning for tradeshows, conferences, and press events always involves a long list of detailed action items. Capture them using video to ensure nothing is overlooked.
  • Problem solving meetings – When your group gets together to solve complex problems, you’ll want to remember all of the important points you discuss. These points can also provide helpful context for other people in your organization who didn’t attend the meeting.
  • New employee training – One of the best ways to ensure that new employees retain the flood of information they receive in their first few days is to simply record it. As they ramp up in their new role, they’ll be able to refer back to key points about your products and services, your company processes, company culture, and more.
  • Strategy and budget planning– Annual strategies and budgets often go through multiple iterations. By capturing the planning meetings, you’ll have a record of key decisions as well as their rationale.

 

The Importance of a Centralized Video Portal

What’s critical with all of these recordings is that they reside in a centralized video portal (sometimes called a “Corporate YouTube”) where authorized users can easily find them and play them back. Without this, your videos end up scattered across employee hard drives, file shares, and SharePoint sites, where they’re undiscoverable and provide little value to the organization.

Panopto automatically handles this for you. Every time you capture a recording using Remote Control, Panopto will take the following steps:

  1. Upload the recording to your secure Panopto video portal
  2. Synchronize all of the audio and video feeds that were recorded (Panopto supports multi-camera video recording as well as screen recording)
  3. Store an archival copy of the video in case you make edits and ever need to roll back to the original version
  4. Generate a table of contents if you’ve recorded a presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote
  5. Index every word that was spoken and shown on screen so that they can be searched
  6. Convert the video into formats that can be played back optimally on any desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone
  7. Send you an email alert when the video is ready to play

Panopto Remote ControlForget about managing video files. Panopto automatically uploads your recording to a secure portal where it’s converted for playback on any device.

As you begin recording more and more meetings and presentations, you’ll build a searchable library of your company’s most valuable asset—the institutional knowledge of your people.
 

What Remote Control Means for the AV Team

Part of what makes Remote Control so powerful is that it brings professional AV recording equipment within reach for any authorized employee. To do that, we’ve implemented new permissions that the AV team and Panopto administrators can configure for the recording equipment within each room.

From within the Panopto video portal, admins can now grant employees limited access to in-room AV equipment. This limited access enables the employees to start and stop recordings and webcasts from their smartphone, and to schedule recordings and webcasts in advance.

It doesn’t, however, allow the employees to change the configuration of the recording equipment. For example, employees can’t re-configure the list of video sources used for a recording, or the quality of the video being captured.

In addition, non-administrators have privacy limitations that prevent them from seeing recordings created by other people, and from seeing the details of recordings scheduled in the future.

For both administrators and employees, Remote Control represents a fundamental shift in how companies capture and stream video using the equipment in corporate classrooms and conference rooms. For employees, Remote Control creates new opportunities to record important meetings and events, and share them with people across the company in ways never before possible. For administrators, Remote Control expands the video recording workflows available within the organization, and helps AV teams scale their resources by putting more control in the hands of end users.
 

How to Get Remote Control

Remote Control is included as part of the Panopto Mobile apps for iOS and Android. We’ll be updating these apps in the next few weeks with the Remote Control capability. In the meantime, if you’d like more information on Remote Control, or would like to see a demo of how it works, schedule time with us today.

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Taking inspiration from the Panopto Conference for my next experiment with video

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jenny whiteI recently chaired a panel discussion at the Panopto Conference which featured several academics talking in-depth about their use of video for teaching and learning. This panel – along with many of the other conference sessions that took place throughout the day – was really interesting to me, as everyone was using video in such different ways. I came back fired with enthusiasm and inspired to continue experimenting with Panopto.

One of the things that particularly caught my imagination was a conversation I had in preparation for the conference panel with Dr Daniel Moore, who has written previously on this blog about his use of video to deliver student feedback. I thought this was a great idea and one that I could start using at my university too. Our Admin office is full of marked scripts and assignments that simply remain uncollected and I think that many of my students would benefit from engaging more actively with their feedback to improve their results. I spend a lot of time writing comments about a student’s writing style, their use of referencing, how their content can be improved and where there is a mismatch against the marking criteria and their work. Yet students, once they have their mark, rarely seek me out to find out how to improve. There is a general feeling that if students made better use of the feedback we give them, then they would gain higher marks by addressing their weaknesses, building on their strengths and by not making the same mistakes over and over again.

The question, of course, is how to get students to engage in this active way and I think video offers a really effective means of doing this.

As a University lecturer, my main target audience is students who fall into the Generation Y and Z bracket – and they are the biggest consumers of video. They are also digital natives and will pull information to them when it is needed. By using video as a core communications medium, lecture content is available in a time-flexible format for students to access whenever they most need it. If I look at my Panopto stats, there is often a blip of activity around 11pm – 1am, which would suggest that this is the time that students are revising or revisiting material for assignments. But regardless of trends in video usage, one of the main advantages is that content doesn’t have to be consumed at this time – students can review first thing in the morning or later in the afternoon if that works better for them. From a practical, teaching perspective, video also makes things easier for me as it drastically cuts down on email traffic around assessment. I can simply refer students to relevant sections on the video recordings, which usually answers most of their questions!

I’ve actually been using video as part of my teaching for many years. I began in 2007, when I used to capture my lectures and then map these recordings to my lecture slides using a rudimentary software tool. A year later, I presented the findings from this mini research project on the effectiveness of lecture capture at the BMAF conference in Edinburgh. The experiences I outlined at the BMAF Conference 2008 showed that with large, diverse student cohorts, video is a perfect medium for getting across a consistent message that can be revisited after the physical lecture has finished.

Over subsequent years, I have developed my approach to video further and embraced new uses for video in the classroom. In addition to standard lecture capture, I also now create ‘micro lectures’ on various aspects of marketing strategy, for instance, on strategic options for market leaders. More recently, I have done video ‘pencasts’ on theoretical marketing models, such as Ansoff’s matrix, using the ‘capture primary screen’ facility on Panopto and running on a Smartboard. I think this is a real bonus for academics who don’t embrace the concept of being filmed, as it purely records voice and what’s on the screen. It’s a fantastic tool for conveying how theoretical models are built, step-by-step.

I have also used video to power the flipped classroom. My students have commented that by being able to watch videos in advance of class, they come to the face-to-face session with a better understanding of the subject and an ability to discuss it more fully.

Having been inspired by Dr Moore’s use of video feedback, and hearing more about the University of Derby’s Flexible Feedback project at the Panopto Conference, my first step towards implementing a similar approach at the University of Chichester was to record an assignment brief. I used a student submission from the previous academic year and gave video feedback on this, both to show how to correctly lay out an academic assignment and to outline where the student lost marks.

My plan is to build on this to start marking new student assignment submissions using video. So, I will record as I am marking, pausing while I enter the student’s score per section onto the mark sheet but recording both my written and audio comments. I will then make the video available to the student in a confidential area on Moodle and ask the student to mark it themselves using the marking criteria and send me their mark. Once they have done this, I will reveal my mark and compare the differences. I have already carried out a dry run of the process, by getting students to mark some of last year’s scripts, using the marking criteria. It was interesting to see that their marking was very accurate and so I actually don’t think there will be too many disparities when we run the project for real.

While I anticipate that the students’ marks and my own will be very similar, there are likely to be various other surprises (on both sides!) along the way. For instance, when I initially videoed the assignment brief and shared my marking process for the first time, many students hadn’t realised that I always start with the bibliography to see what resources they’ve used to complete their assignment. This has dramatically changed the standard of the scripts that I am currently marking, as the bibliographies are already much richer and the content is therefore far more informed. Of course, I have been telling students that this is how I mark for years but this is the first year that I have seen such a quantum leap in the quality of student assignments, so I think there is something about seeing the process on a recording that has really helped the message to sink in!

Given that the quality of student’s work is already improving, I think they will be very positive about this new development. I’m going to be surveying students to get a better picture of their views on the project, so we’ll get feedback on the feedback very soon!

If your institution wants to use video to enhance student feedback, flip the classroom, create ‘micro lectures’ or record lecture content, talk to the Panopto team to schedule an online demo and set up a free trial.

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Sales Training vs. Sales Enablement — What’s The Difference?

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One in three sales lost today are for a simple lack of sales preparation.

For a typical $1 billion company, every year poor sales preparation results in $14 million in wasted sales and marketing expenses — and $100 million in lost sales opportunities.
Sales Meeting - Wikimedia Commons
Those figures, both from the analysts at IDC, provide all the answer needed for anyone who might question why there’s been so much recent buzz around the practice of sales enablement.

These days it’s almost impossible to find a firm that isn’t investigating new tools, programs, and procedures with the hope of better equipping their sales teams to make meaningful connections with leads and customers, intelligently respond to their needs, and more efficiently and effectively usher them along the buying process.

Yet for all this newfound interest in sales effectiveness, it’s not as if the sales teams of past generations went unmanaged and unmeasured. So what’s so new about the modern practice of sales enablement? And what makes sales enablement different from traditional sales training? Let’s take a look at each.

Sales Training: Where Better Sales Begins

For all the new tactics and all the new technology, the foundation of building better sales teams continues to be in sales training. But while organizations have been training salespeople for just about as long as there’ve been salespeople to train, don’t be fooled into thinking there’s nothing new to see here. Modern sales training activities are becoming smarter, more detailed, and more accessible than ever.

At it’s most fundamental, sales training can be defined as any employee training an organization might deliver with the goal of helping its sales teams cultivate and close more and better sales.

In practice, most organizations deliver two types of sales training: Product and Process.

  • Product Sales Training covers the “what” — all the technical and practical knowledge your sales reps will need in order to best sell your products and services. From technical specifications and integration points to service level agreements and operating uptimes and more — these sessions work to ensure your sales team knows the details that will drive customers’ decisions.
  • Process Sales Training covers the “how” — both the institutional processes and philosophies that organize how your team should conduct the sales process. It’s a wide spectrum, and should cover everything from how to correctly use your CRM tools to the strategic approach you’d like your reps to take as they interact with customers — these sessions help ensure that every opportunity is handled appropriately, managed transparently, and conducted according to the company’s brand and values.

In the past, sales training of just about every type would have been delivered as a classroom training session. For organizations with large or geographically dispersed sales teams, a single session would often have been held multiple times in multiple locations to ensure everyone could attend.

Today, however, technology is enabling more sales teams to offer more training on-demand. With tools like video for sales training, sales executives can now ensure their reps have 24/7 access to any knowledge they may need — from the details on the latest product enhancement, to step-by-step instructions for adding a customer to a contact follow-up email campaign or other program.

Best of all, according to Brandon Hall Research, on-demand elearning has been demonstrated to save sales teams up to 35% of the time that would otherwise be required for in-class training. That means sales reps can get back to selling faster.

And because video eliminates the need for trainers to repeat the same sessions over and over, many teams now find their training organization can go deeper than ever, offering more and more detailed recorded tutorials to further improve how sales teams function. For a great example of just how a sales organization can use video to facilitate team member training, check out the sample recording below.


 

How Is Sales Enablement Different from Sales Training?

Sales Enablement vs Sales Training - Panopto Video Platform
Our customers tell us there are five pillars of sales enablement. And while each organization will identify them a little differently, the core concepts typically break down as follows:

  1. Onboarding
    Over the course of their first 30-90 days, you need to instill your team culture, vision, and mission into every member of your team. You’ll also need to get them up to speed on your products, your sales strategy, and your methodology.
  2. Ongoing training
    The world never stops evolving, and neither do your products and processes. As noted above, ensuring your sales team sees and understands all the latest features and enhancements in your product line as soon as they are ready is essential to their success.Just as critical is your traditional corporate training — regular instructional sessions on team processes, overviews of business strategy from the executive team, internal compliance presentations from learning and development — all of which help your team better understand your organization’s priorities and generate the right kind of sales opportunities.
  3. Internal communication
    Effective communications is the lifeblood of any team — and a particular challenge when your sales team members can often be too busy for email.Whether it’s outbound messages from the home office to the field, or insight and best practice sharing among coworkers, the messages you deliver on a day-to-day basis are essential to helping your team, learning from one another, improving sales techniques, and closing more business.
  4. Pre-sales prospect engagement
    Your sales team will tell you — closing the next big sale is a marathon, not a sprint. Often the ongoing communications between prospect and Sales are a driving factor in whether a deal gets done.This pillar is often a joint venture with your marketing team. The key to making this a sales enablement success is ensuring that sales and marketing are properly connected, and that your sales team has the communications tools they need to move prospects through the sales funnel.
  5. Post-sale communication
    The importance of the connection your sales team creates with your customers doesn’t wane when the ink on the contract is dry — it’s just as essential to ensuring current customers stay loyal.Ongoing communications, insider tips to getting the most out of your products, sneak previews of coming features, and even simple routine check-ins are all moments your team can use to reinforce your relationship, identify potential trouble spots, and work to ensure renewals can be quick and easy.

In recent years, video has proven its worth in just about every aspect of sales enablement.

While video is well-known for its ability to attract new prospects, it isn’t just a tool for marketers. It’s also an excellent way to help sales teams communicate more effectively — with each other and with your customers.

Short of face-to-face conversation, video is the most effective way to share a message. As organizations adopt video, sales teams benefit with anywhere, anytime access to training, tips and strategies, a means to quickly record and share product demonstrations with prospects, a more engaging way to send personalized sales messages and more.

With so many benefits, it’s no surprise video is taking off in sales organizations. The Aberdeen Group has found that many forward-looking companies are already using video across the sales cycle:

  • Marketing and awareness (In use with 67% of research respondents)
  • Lead nurturing (53%)
  • Conversions (60%)
  • Lead qualification (47%)
  • Deal closings (33%)
  • Post-sale communications (33%)

 

Find Out More!
ICON - CTA - 18 Ways You Can Boost Sales Enablement with VideoForward-looking organizations are already adopting video to support almost every aspect of the sales cycle. Don’t get left behind!

Find out how you can use video to help your sales team break through — including 18 ways you can use video to enhance the way your organization does sales enablement — in our new white paper. Get your free copy today!

And if you’d like to learn more about how video can help your business better prepare your sales reps for success, contact our team for a demonstration or sign up for a free 30-day trial today.

The post Sales Training vs. Sales Enablement — What’s The Difference? appeared first on .

Solving Onboarding Challenges — with On-Demand Video

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For many organizations,  onboarding presents a serious challenge: how to provide time-sensitive training, tailored to specific roles, and delivered to a small audience that may be remotely located across the country or around the world?

It’s a daunting task, and an expensive one. Getting new employees up to speed on the culture, processes, and knowledge base of a company can cost up to 30 percent of a new hire’s annual salary.

Better Employee Onboarding May Help Prevent Early Turnover - Panopto Video PlatformThere is, however, good reason for that investment:

A centralized, focused, properly resourced process of incorporating new talent into a firm may help prevent early turnover for as many as 1 in 4 new hires.

Sound onboarding not only helps organizations retain their people — it helps them save money too. Filling a position left vacant due to poor onboarding techniques on average costs companies nearly $11,000.

Whether it’s for job-specific training, benefits enrollment, or communicating company culture, effective onboarding is an essential part of every organization’s learning and development activities.

Yet therein lies an age-old problem: how do you make onboarding useful, engaging, and memorable, especially when your new hires may be coming in with little or no experience of your organization or even your industry?

Drinking from the fire hose: the biggest problem with traditional onboarding.

When a new hire walks through the door on day one, you have two main objectives – first, to make them feel like part of the team right from the beginning, and second, to ramp them up as quickly as possible so they can start adding value to your business.

Yet at too many organizations, onboarding today requires new hires to sit through a day or more’s worth of in-person presentations from existing team members and executives — everyone giving an overview of their domain as part of a rapid fire rundown of organizational responsibilities.

Helpful as their intentions may be, these sessions can simply overwhelm new hires, leaving them little hope of remembering anything but scattershot detail. And for teams that onboard frequently, such a routine can also be a burden on existing staff that have to block time out of their busy schedules to take part.

Worse still, those sessions are generally one-time-only affairs, leaving your new person with not much more than a heavy handbook to put in a drawer and never reference again.

The subsequent weeks often involve a large amount on-the-job, on-the-spot learning, with few if any resources to help employees retain the deluge of incoming information.

Video can help you scale your onboarding efforts.

It can take months for new hires to truly ramp in their role. A study from Sales & Marketing Management, for example, notes the average organization spends 73 days training entry-level sales reps. While no two positions will follow the same onboarding process, organizations that use video recordings make the learning curve more manageable.

To your new employees, that’s no trivial value. According to a BambooHR survey of employees who had quit a job within six months of starting:

  • 23 percent felt they hadn’t received clear guidelines to their new responsibilities
  • 21 percent said they wanted “more effective training

The message is clear: a thoughtful, comprehensive onboarding plan must be part of your organization’s new hire plan. Yet for most organizations, delivering that detailed level of live training in a timely and personalized fashion for each and every new hire simply isn’t feasible.

That’s where video offers real opportunity for your training team to go above and beyond.

4 ways video enhances the employee onboarding process:

When companies invest in onboarding, they reap the benefits of reduced turnover and improved productivity.

In forward-looking companies, video has already become an essential part of that investment, helping to scale and expand onboarding activities. Here’s why:

Employee Onboarding Training - Panopto Video Platform1. Video helps employees retain knowledge. A central challenge to every kind of organizational training is how best to make information memorable. Studies show that just 30 minutes after they finish a training session, your people will remember only 58% of the material you’ve covered — and just 7 days later they’ll have forgotten fully 65% of what you had shared. In fact, in just 6 months, they’ll have forgotten 90% of your training materials.

Video can improve people’s ability to remember concepts and details — with effects that actually increase over time. One study showed that presentations that included visuals like video along with text was 9 percent more effective than text alone when comprehension was tested right away, but that it was 83 percent more effective when the test was delayed — implying an improved ability to remember the information better later.

Along with making your content more memorable, video also makes it easily findable. With a modern video platform, your people can search across your entire library of training videos, including inside the actual content of each video for any word spoken or any word that appears on screen, and automatically fast-forward to the moment where the word appears.

Unlike that big, printed handbook sitting on their desk, a library of searchable onboarding video helps ensure your people find the training they need, on-demand — whether or not they knew it existed beforehand.

2. Video helps reduce training program costs. Not only does video help employees retain knowledge gained during training — it saves money spent on that training.

Microsoft Results - Panopto Employee Onboarding PlatformAfter finding that up to 40% of its classroom training costs were spent on travel and lodging, IBM moved half of its training programs to an eLearning format. Over the first two years of the program alone, the company has saved $579 million.

Similar savings have been reported at Microsoft, where the company’s internal video portal has become the common substitute for in-class trainings and smaller events. According to the company’s own estimates, the switch to video reduced the costs for classroom training from approximately $320 per hour per participant down to just $17 per person.

3. Video helps companies ensure training material consistency. One of the major advantages of video is that it helps large companies maintain a consistent, high-quality messaging standard during this sensitive time in the life of new employees.

For larger organizations or those with geographically dispersed offices, storefronts, or sales territories, consistency is often a significant challenge to proper onboarding. Having multiple trainers — or even multiple wholly separate teams or departments — in charge of onboarding increases the likelihood that your new employee experience will be different for every new hire.

Leveraging video training during onboarding solves that problem, ensuring that each employee will still have a similar experience and will receive a consistent message regardless of who conducts the training.

4. Video helps employees feel more engaged and connected from day one. It’s this last point that is often the most overlooked. Onboarding isn’t just training — it’s a delicate process of introducing a new employee to the culture and values of a company.

Onboarding helps your new hires become effective members of your organization. The potential value of effective onboarding has been well-documented — already researchers have found that well-executed onboarding techniques lead to positive outcomes such as higher job satisfaction, better job performance, and greater organizational commitment.

Video instantly extends the reach of your onboarding programs worldwide. A comprehensive library of onboarding training video can greet each and every new hire from the very moment they start their first day, ready to help them find their way around, get up to speed, and start speaking your organization’s language. And best of all, video can do all that anywhere and anytime, even if your training team is half a world away.

ICON-Onboarding White Paper - Make Every First Day A Good OneAs organizations seek to align talent and position themselves competitively for the next 3-5 years, it’s now more important than ever to get employee onboarding right.

And with the right tools, you can use video to help take your organization’s onboarding programs to the next level.

Keep reading.

Learn 15 ways to enhance new employee onboarding with video — with a simple guide to creating an onboarding program that works — in our new white paper, Make Every First Day A Great One.

Download your free copy today!

The post Solving Onboarding Challenges — with On-Demand Video appeared first on .

Are Your Captions Compliant? What Everyone Recording Lectures Needs to Know

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On February 12, 2015, the National Association for the Deaf (NAD) filed a series of lawsuits against both Harvard and MIT, contending both institutions “discriminate against deaf and hard of hearing people by failing to caption the vast and varied array of online content they make available to the general public, including massive open online courses (MOOCs).”

My Trusty Gavel - FlickrIn announcing the legal action, the NAD also shared a full statement, making clear its case and outlining the outcomes it targets. For the now-majority of academic institutions that deliver at least some learning materials online, a few points may well read as wake-up calls.

In its release, lawyers for the NAD comment, “Federal law prohibits MIT and Harvard from denying individuals with disabilities the benefits of their programs and services, including those provided to the public on the Internet. It is right that Harvard and MIT, which both receive millions of dollars of federal tax support, are mandated by our civil rights laws to provide equal access to their programs and services. The civil rights laws apply not only to services offered in brick and mortar places. They require equal access to electronic services on the Internet that modern technology makes possible.”

The statement also makes clear that the NAD expects to use the precedent set in these suits as a basis for insisting on broader change. Again from the release, “Our hope is that this lawsuit will change not only Harvard’s and MIT’s practices, but set an example for other universities to follow. These lawsuits seek to reform conduct. They do not seek money damages.”

That these charges have been brought against Harvard and MIT is no small signal itself. Both are charter members of edX — a consortium of schools and universities that provide free courses online — meaning both are established, longtime leaders in making online learning materials accessible. Likewise, both are private institutions — a status which offers more operational leeway than might be afforded a public university. If the NAD succeeds in its suit against these two defendants, the precedent set will likely apply to many if not most other academic institutions in the United States.

From One-Off To Requirement — Online Learning Materials Make The Leap

The NAD’s legal action against Harvard and MIT serves to underscore the incredible transition that’s happened over the last decade in the field of technology-enabled learning.

Only a few short years ago, recorded lectures, online courses, and micro-lecture podcasts were a pedagogical novelty — one-offs that enthusiastic educators embraced with the hope of offering students a better way to engage with and study the detailed information presented in class.

Fast-forward to not yet even decade since the very first implementations of lecture recording technology, however, and already today online learning tools have become an essential part of the learning environment.

Students report that online learning materials like recorded lectures provide an invaluable study aid, as well as a much-needed support system for those instances when they can’t attend a class in person. Those resources yield real results, too — lecture capture technology has proven to help boost classroom test scores and overall grades in those classrooms where it’s offered.

Accessibility Is A Must — Both For New Adopters and Existing Implementations

As lecture capture and other online tools continue to prove their worth in supporting the educational experience, more and more academic institutions are today taking what often began as small pilot projects and rolling them out across whole departments, schools, and campuses.

Now as academic administrators consider those technologies in the light of the NAD’s suits against Harvard and MIT, the lesson shouldn’t be to avoid new tools or to drag their heels in addressing new opportunities; rather, it should be to make comprehensive support for future accessibility needs a standard part of the assessment of any pilot project or expanded rollout.

For schools and universities new to lecture capture or with relatively small implementations, this might be as simple as adding your standard technology accessibility review process to any new product or contract review (and if you haven’t already, ensuring that Section 508-compliant captioning is specifically called out as a mandatory feature).

For institutions where lecture capture and other online learning tools have already been embraced, meanwhile, a greater effort may be required. After all, Harvard and MIT did offer captions in their lecture videos — but as the NAD case specifically states, the poor quality of the captions provided (often due in large part to inaccurate machine-based transcription) rendered the videos “confusing and sometimes completely unintelligible.”

Especially for those where online learning tools may have been homegrown or assembled from other technologies — now is clearly the time to review your system’s ability to support accessibility in general and captioning in particular. As Harvard & MIT have now found, even well-regarded systems may not be comprehensive enough to support true accessibility.

How Panopto Supports Captioning

Panopto fully supports ADA Section 508-compliant captioning.

Captioning management is a part of the general settings for every video, and ordering new captions for any video can be done with just two clicks of a mouse. Panopto also enables users to upload existing captions as well. For a detailed look at how Panopto supports captioning services, check out our Support site.

For viewers, captions on Panopto are simple. Those watching a captioned video on our interactive web-based player can follow along just by clicking the “Captions” tab on the in-video navigation.

ADA Section 508 Compliant Captioning - Panopto Lecture Capture Platform

Importantly, for all those videos you may want to share publicly on a webpage — Panopto’s embedded video player also fully supports captioning. As you’ll see in the example below, viewers can simply click the closed-captioning “CC” icon to toggle captions on and off.

 

Make Sure Your Captions Are Compliant

Although the cases brought forward by the NAD concern only Harvard and MIT today, forward-thinking organizations should take steps to recognize potential future implications. US-based schools and universities should be paying keen attention as this case progresses — as well should other institutions that both utilize video and receive some federal funding, including many non-profits, non-US schools with US partnerships, and even some corporate training practitioners.

For more information on Panopto, including how the Panopto video platform can help your organization provide ADA Section 508-compliant captions, contact our team today.

The post Are Your Captions Compliant? What Everyone Recording Lectures Needs to Know appeared first on .

Snow Day? Keep Class in Session.

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All across the country a winter of record high snowfall and record low temperatures is taxing snow day policies and syllabi alike with a straightforward challenge: how to keep school in session while keeping students safe in icy conditions?

There is an answer – and it starts with the little circular lens right at the top of every educator’s laptop and smartphone.

Video.

Video has already become central to universities around the globe, capturing lectures, flipping classrooms, enhancing student practice and projects – and for more and more schools, it’s become a way to keep class in session even when campus is closed.

Don’t take our word for it. The New York Times covered the trend in a feature piece, Snow Day? That’s Great. Now Log In. Get to Class.

There’s almost no limit to how your teachers use video to keep class in session. Popular options include:

  • Flipped classrooms – teachers record short videos introducing the day’s assignment. That assignment can then be discussed in class once school reopens. Flipped classrooms are a great way to let students take in information at their own pace, and to shift the focus of the classroom from lecture to conversation.

  • Remote lectures – teachers can simply record themselves presenting the lecture they had planned for the day, and sharing with students to review. Panopto even enables teachers to record both themselves and their presentation slides to better maintain the in-class experience.

  • Student video – for those teachers fortunate enough to be able to use the weather in the day’s lesson plan, you can encourage students to record their own video – from experiments with melting or falling snow to weather-themed creative writing and presentations – or more traditional assignments, as well.

The best part about video is that it’s easy. Just point and shoot with a smartphone or a laptop webcam and share the file with your students. If your school has a video library like Panopto, uploading and sharing video can be as easy as clicking a mouse.

Schools around the world rely on video and Panopto to make classes available even when students can’t attend. From Creighton and Eastern Michigan to Northwest University and  The University of Birmingham, even to The American University in Cairo or hundreds of others, universities have found video is ideal for keeping students connected and learning, even when weather, security, illness, or any number of other problems would conspire to force a day off.

Video can help you keep class in session – even when the classroom is closed. Looking for a platform that can help you make video in the classroom easy – before the next blizzard comes along? Try Panopto free for 30 days!

The post Snow Day? Keep Class in Session. appeared first on .

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