The practice of sales enablement has rapidly evolved during recent years. And the technologies that support this practice are in high demand. According to a recent report by Aragon Research, sales enablement technology is expected to grow from its current $780 million market size to $5 billion by the year 2021.

A driving factor in the growing investment in sales enablement technology is the goal of building efficiencies that can reduce expenses across sales organizations and ultimately boost sales. Forrester estimates that the typical technology company spends $135,000 per salesperson each year in sales support activity, making up as much as 19% of the company’s total SG&A expense — not including travel or compensation. One figure from a prominent sales enablement technology vendor supports at least part of that equation, estimating that over 75% of companies using sales enablement tools saw an increase in sales within the first year of implementation.

But what is sales enablement, exactly?

Sales enablement is defined as the resources a company provides to help its sales team engage contacts and close deals. The discipline of sales enablement within a business is generally divided between sales and marketing, who collaborate on common resource requirements and responsibilities. Resources provided can include sales training, marketing collateral, CRM software, access to current customer and product information — essentially, anything that prepares your sales team to participate in meaningful conversations with prospects and win business.

The data supporting sales enablement strategies is compelling. Market intelligence firm IDC has estimated that one in three sales are lost due to a lack of sales preparation, despite research indicating that salespeople spend 7 hours per week — nearly one whole business day — searching for information to help prepare for sales calls. Therefore, companies have begun to increase their sales enablement budgets in an effort to make their sales teams more efficient.

How does video support sales enablement?

Your buyers are more knowledgeable than ever. By the time a prospective buyer contacts your sales organization, they’ve already read the marketing material on your website, visited your competitor’s website, and have read the latest analyst reports for your industry, creating a challenge for your team to stand out. Sales reps need scalable tools that help them differentiate themselves from competitors and make the most of their meetings with prospective customers.

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A video platform meets these needs by helping organizations efficiently give sales reps the information and resources they need in a compelling way. Video also empowers sales reps to communicate more effectively — among themselves, as well as with their prospects. When organizations incorporate video into their sales enablement process, they can realize the following benefits:

• Anytime, anywhere access to training: Sales methodology, role-play exercises, updated product information, conference sessions, and more can be recorded and uploaded into the company’s video portal, where reps can view them on an on-demand basis, whether in the office on their laptop computers or in the field using a mobile device.
• Informal knowledge sharing: Video can help your reps quickly capture ideas, best practices, and supplement ideas whenever and wherever they are. Team members can take advantage of each other’s insider expertise and learn new tactics, even if they’re geographically dispersed, or long after your expert has moved on to another role.
• Search for information more effectively: Cut down on the time your sales reps spend looking for specific information in your company’s knowledge repository. Industry-leading video platforms enable users to search inside all of the videos on the company’s “Corporate YouTube” for the exact slide, example, or information to present to a prospective customer.
• Personalized communications: Video can improve the performance of prospecting communications. Studies have shown that including the word “video” in an email’s subject line can increase click-through rates by 7-13%. Adding brief video recordings to post-call follow-up messages can be a quick and simple way to make these communications more personal and help differentiate your messages from those of your competitors.

Differentiate Your Team With A Video Platform For Sales Enablement 

To learn more ways that video can improve your company’s sales enablement processes, download our free white paper, Break Through: 18 Ways You Can Boost Sales Enablement With Video.

The post What Is Sales Enablement? appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Businesses and universities both continue to find new applications for video, transforming an ever-increasing number of text-based resources, communications, and learning materials into engaging and informative presentations.

Students, instructors, employees, executives — nearly everyone prefers to learn and receive communications from videos.  82 percent of students at 4-year colleges access digital lecture content at least once a week. And 75 percent of employees are more likely to watch a video than read a text at work.

As videos have become easier and easier to produce and share, the sheer volume of recordings being created and shared in today’s universities and businesses is growing exponentially. Looking at the numbers, Cisco recently predicted that, within the year, nearly 70% of all data flowing through the Internet will be video. And just in February of 2018 alone, 209 years’ worth of video was streamed from Panopto’s own video cloud.

But as videos become a more common part of our daily teaching, training, and communicating, it also creates a new challenge: ensuring accessibility.

Because without sound, a video isn’t terribly useful to anyone.

Whether for personal reasons related to hearing impairment or other learning disabilities, or technical reasons related to the availability of audio playback equipment or other challenges, some viewers won’t be able to simply press play and get all the information they need from a video recording.

And the best way to remove that potential roadblock for viewers is to ensure your institution’s videos have captions. 

Why Captioning Videos Is Important

An Ofcom study showed 80% of people who use video captions don’t have a hearing disability.

Even if your institution isn’t required by law to provide accessible resources for your viewers, there are any number of reasons to invest in captioning the videos in your library. Studies have shown that captioned videos are simply more effective as a teaching and communication tool:

• Captions improve comprehension by native and foreign language speakers.
• Captions help compensate for poor audio quality or background noise within a video.
• Captions make video useful when a person is watching with the sound off or viewing in a noisy environment that obscures the sound.

For most organizations, however, the problem with captioning videos (particularly if you require 99% accuracy to comply with the ADA) is that the process hasn’t traditionally been easy or affordable.

Related Reading: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About Video Captioning, Answered

Captioning Videos The Hard Way

Colleges and universities have led the way in piecing together solutions to the video accessibility problem in order to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), and also in response to a number of recent high-profile lawsuits.

For many, the solutions include either working with an external video captioning partner or employing grad students and teachers’ aides to caption videos by hand. Unfortunately, the workflows with these solutions are often complex and can include lengthy turnaround times and high costs.

At its most basic, the process of captioning a video is fairly straightforward. First, the audio must be transcribed, then that transcription must be tracked to the timeline of the video.

Here’s what that process has traditionally looked like: When a video is selected to be captioned, someone is tasked to type out each word said in the recording. Often this is accomplished across two screens, with the transcriber using one to play the video and the other to type, and pausing playback every few seconds to keep up. Once the transcript is complete, either the transcriber or another specialist will then create captions as dialog boxes in your video, synchronizing the words shown on screen with the words being spoken at that moment in the recording.

A slightly less painful, although still cumbersome process, involves uploading the video online (either to YouTube or elsewhere) and using a free captioning tool to generate a time-stamped transcription. The caveat with free captioning tools, though, is that the video needs to be hosted publicly — something that won’t work for internal-facing videos that need to remain private. Then, once the captions have been reviewed and edited to ensure accuracy, someone will download the caption file and either add it to the video with editing software or upload it with the video to wherever it’s being hosted, if possible.

And as a final alternative, a video can be uploaded to a paid captioning service that will generate a caption file for a fee. This often improves the quality of the resulting captions, although doesn’t eliminate the work involved. Paid turnaround times can still be lengthy, and whenever the file is finished, the final captions will still need to be applied to the video using the same steps as required by the free options.

Now imagine executing one of these captioning workflows for every video in your library. 

Regardless of which path you choose, all this will often be an arduous process even for shorter videos. For longer videos like hour-long lectures or 90-minute all-hands meetings, the task is so great that most universities and businesses will choose not to caption the final video unless they have a specific reason to do so.

Failing to caption your videos, however, will make them less valuable as informational resources for your viewers. With so much video content being produced, organizations need a better way to caption videos that is quick, affordable, and scalable.

A Video Platform Makes Captioning Easy

A video platform like Panopto gives you easier options for generating video captions for one video, a folder of videos, or your entire video library. Here’s how captioning works with Panopto.

Machine-generated captions for every video.

To start, every video uploaded to Panopto’s video platform is automatically machine-transcribed and timestamped using a technology called automatic speech recognition (ASR). This process also makes it possible to search inside your videos, which you can learn more about here.

Depending on the sound quality in the video, Panopto will display machine-generated captions that are 70-90 percent accurate. This can be done for an individual video with just a few clicks (shown below) or set up to programmatically generate captions for an entire folder or library with no extra effort. Machine-generated captions can also be downloaded, edited, and uploaded through the online video editor, which is another option for virtually-free captioning within Panopto.

Affordable, ADA compliant captions in just a few clicks.

Panopto also makes it remarkably affordable to request human-generated, ADA-compliant captions for one or an entire collection of videos.

Simply select captioning from a drop-down within the Panopto editor (as shown below) and get your videos captioned for as little as $1 a minute. Faster turnaround time for human-generated captions will cost slightly more, but since we are able to work with our captioning partners at scale, we can pass those discounts along to you.

And that’s it. Panopto’s video platform can do all of the work to caption videos for you, or at the very least, most of the work.

More Than Just Video Captioning

You get more than just video captioning with Panopto. Our end-to-end video platform supports recording, live streaming, hosting, and searching videos all in one easy-to-use tool. Contact our team to request a free 30-day trial of our industry-leading video platform.

The post The Easiest Way To Add Captions To Videos At Scale appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

A guest blog post from Associate Professor Till Winkler, Associate Professor, Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School (CBS) in collaboration with Viducon Denmark.

In previous guest blogs with Panopto (which you can find here and here), I outlined some of my initial experiences with embedding video-based learning into my teaching practice. Inspired by my students’ positive reactions to the video content I had produced, I decided that with my next cohort of learners I would move to a truly blended learning approach.

In an elective course on Managing IT in the Digital Age, run with my colleague Associate Professor Matthias Trier, we decided that our blend would adopt the flipped classroom model. This means that we provided a series of online lecture videos in advance to the students then used the valuable classroom time for workshop-based teaching, which focussed on student interaction and discussion.

Video and workshops – making the blend work at CBS

So first, the flip itself – how did we power that? Well, as I had recorded lectures from the previous year, we decided to repurpose this content. I had already worked on producing short recorded lectures that were designed to be easily digested online (as opposed to traditional hour-long lectures) so most of the digital content was already in place. It was easy to copy these recordings into a new course folder and each week my students were granted access to the relevant video via our learning management system (which is integrated with our Panopto instance). We demanded students to watch a set of these videos each week and we injected additional active learning elements by asking them to complete short online tasks related to the videos, such as completing quizzes and responding to open-ended questions.

The lecture videos mainly covered conceptual content such as theoretical frameworks, empirical findings, and practical insights. I think that allowing students to access this type of content online so they can absorb it at their own pace and really consolidate their understanding has a lot of advantages, so I was confident that this flipped approach would work for the students.

Having watched the videos and completed the online activities in advance, students came to the face-to-face workshop sessions fully prepared and with the expectation to engage. In the workshop sessions, we asked them to apply the concepts they had learned in the online video content to a concrete problem faced by a case study company and then to present their ideas to the rest of the class. We chose a learning space that lent itself perfectly to this kind of workshop format to maximise the opportunities for peer interaction amongst the students.

After the course had finished, our partners from Viducon independently conducted follow-up interviews with a number of students to see what they thought about the blended course format we had adopted. The feedback was very encouraging, with students saying that they had really appreciated our efforts to try a different teaching approach on this course. Overall, they thought that a blended learning format had advantages from both an academic and a social perspective.

Student views on the online part of the blended learning

When asked about the online part of the course, the students commented that having access to video content in advance helped provide them with a ‘mental map’ of the field of study and an important overview of the key concepts. One of the students commented:

“The video material was divided into clear subcategories and topics. This provided a lot of structure and a good overview. The videos served like an online library, where we could easily go back and select a topic and then watch the videos again, for instance, for the exam.”

The students also appreciated the short, condensed explanations of theories in the videos, each of which was between 4 and 7 minutes in length. They could see the time we had invested in preparing these videos and commented that this succinct content helped them hone in on the most important messages. As one of our learners put it:

“In video lectures, the teacher is forced to be very specific. Explanations are clear-cut. There is not so much ‘noise’ in the transaction of knowledge from the sender to the receiver.”

Our use of video also helped create a sense of engagement with the students before we had even met, with one student even going so far as to say:

“I had seen many hours of video of you before I met you in the classroom. When I first saw you in class, it felt like meeting a celebrity.”

From the feedback interviews, we also found out that students had developed different ways to work with the videos. Some made extensive use of the pause button, or others slowed down the playback speed in the Panopto player to be able to take their own notes. One student commented:

“When I try to learn about theory, I often feel that I need more frequent breaks. So in class, I often feel forced to keep on learning even though my brain is not ready for this. But with the videos I could just pause, have a 5 minute break and then press play again. […] I can reflect on what was said in the video, take notes and see if I got everything right, and only then continue.”

One key thing we learned from the interviews is that, even for a user-friendly platform like Panopto, learners can benefit from a short introduction to the features the platform provides. With Panopto, for example, learners can not only regulate the speed of the videos and pause the content, but also take individual time-stamped notes. They can either share their notes with their fellow learners or keep them private. By helping students become more familiar with the functionality available to them in a platform like Panopto, I believe we can make the online aspects of blended learning even more effective.

Student views on the face-to-face part of blended learning

When we asked students about the face-to-face part of the blend, many of them commented that while they greatly appreciated the online learning elements, social interaction with their professors and fellow students was still of vital importance to them. One said:

“If you had a purely online course then I think you would miss the […] interaction with other classmates. So the combination of having both – online and offline – that is what made the course strong for me.”

Most students emphasised that in-depth discussions, exercises and talking through case studies simply works better in a classroom scenario – in the words of another student:

“I would like the theory lectures to be 100 percent on video, and the case studies should be in the classroom. Because in practice it becomes alive.”

Looking ahead: implications for teachers

The general view of the majority of the students on the course was that blended learning, combining video and classroom-based workshops, was more effective than either of these elements alone. As one student put it:

“The combination of having the theory more or less online with video and the practical cases offline – that is a good combination”.

Consequently, it wasn’t surprising to see that many of the students expressed their hope that more courses at CBS would adopt a blended format:

“If I could improve anything, I would make all lectures at CBS like this!”

It seems that the message this sends to teachers is clear – we need to rethink some of the more traditional ways we’ve previously taught students to embrace new approaches that can lead to better student engagement. We need to assess what material is best delivered online so it can be reviewed at a student’s own pace and what content is best delivered in a classroom scenario. Of course, teachers will need to find their own approach to the blended format depending on the nature of the subject they teach. But, what seems to be evident is that students benefit from blended learning as this teaching method can facilitate improved learning outcomes.

The post Student Perspectives on Blended Learning: Getting the Most out of Video and the Classroom appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

St George’s University of London – the UK’s only university dedicated to medical and health sciences education, training and research – is using Panopto to support a range of video-based learning activities. In this guest blog post, Evan Dickerson, Learning Technology Services Manager at St George’s, tells us why they wanted to start using video as a learning resource for their students, how they got started and what’s next.

Getting started with Panopto for lecture capture and video management

At St George’s, we initially began using Panopto as part of a lecture capture pilot project, before carrying out a larger-scale implementation across campus. This saw us make Panopto available in our seven large lecture theatres as well as in around 120 smaller teaching rooms. We’ve now been using Panopto across campus for just over one academic year.

We use Panopto primarily as a Video Content Management System and for lecture capture. For the recording workflow we set-up each room to capture at least audio and slides or screen (video is optionally available in the large lecture theatres). We let the academics themselves initiate the lecture capture. In each class we have a student representative present who knows how to use Panopto to assist any academic who needed help to initiate a recording. In reality their help isn’t usually needed as Panopto’s recording functionality is very simple – lecturers just press record using the desktop shortcut and present as normal.

In terms of storing and sharing the captured content, at first our process was very manual, with members of the Learning Technology team uploading each recording into the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). This is largely because we are in the process of moving to Canvas VLE and so didn’t want to set up an integration between Panopto and Moodle. Now that we’ve completed the switch to our new Canvas VLE, we’re finalising the integration with Panopto, which will mean there will be Single Sign-On and a host of other benefits for our students. This will make the lecture capture and management process much more seamless for our academics, students and the Learning Technology team. Prior to implementing the integration with Canvas, editing and uploading recordings took at least 80% of the working week for the placement student that Learning Technology Services employs annually from Brunel University. Following the integration, we should be able to make the placement more varied to cover the full range of technologies that our team supports.

Why lecture capture?

The drive to offer lecture capture across campus was very much in response to student demand. Our students are eager to re-watch their lecture content and considered it a valuable resource. Accordingly, our policy is that all lectures that can be recorded will be recorded. There are important exceptions, of course. When there is a strong case for the session not to be recorded – for instance, for any content that contains sensitive patient information – we wouldn’t record it. But overall, we encourage academics to see this as an additional benefit they can offer their students. After all, most lecturers make their presentation slides available on the VLE after a lecture, so it’s not too much of a leap for many lecturers.

From the perspective of our students, knowing that their lectures will be available on-demand after the live session has been a great help. When we first implemented the technology, some of them were so keen to get the lecture recordings that as soon as the live lecture had ended they would come to the Learning Technology Services office to ask us when the recording would be shared with them. This gave us a chance to talk to them and find out how they wanted to use the recordings. The majority definitely saw it as a supplement to the live lecture, rather than a replacement. They appreciate that if they miss the physical lecture they will also miss out on all the interactive elements of being with the lecturer and their peers.

It’s important to note that at St George’s, our students have a very tightly-packed schedule of lectures and it’s not uncommon for them to have 5, 6 or even 7 hours of lectures in a single day. This helps to explain their eagerness to get the recordings. If they don’t listen back to a recording as soon as possible to consolidate their learning, their academic programme will have moved on. We’re very focused on letting the students have access to their captured lectures in a timely way – though, of course, it’s also sometimes necessary to be able to wait so that academics can edit out anything sensitive. One area we want to build on is highlighting to our lecturers that it is easy to pause a recording in Panopto if, for example, they are going to talk about a specific patient case study or something similar. If we can get the lecturers to pause the recordings in the live session, this will remove the need to make edits after the session, reducing the post-production work and delays to the availability of the recordings.

Flipped classroom, student assessments and more

Last November I attended the annual Panopto Conference on video learning and during one the sessions, we played a game which got the universities in attendance to think about 16 different ways to use video for learning and consider which ones were already in use at their institution and which ones they were interested in trying.

I thought this was a great way of helping our own academics think about new ways to use the system with their students, so I adapted the game to the video uses that are most relevant at St George’s and now use this in our staff training sessions. One of the major reasons we chose Panopto was because we think the flexibility it offers will support many different types of video learning and so the system will offer even greater return on investment.

Of course, some members of the university have already started experimenting with different uses for Panopto. For instance, at our Student Union, they use Panopto to live broadcast their Annual General Meeting. This is especially important at an institution like St George’s because many of our students go out on placements and things like this really help enhance their sense of belonging when they can’t be on-campus. Some staff are also recording video tutorials for their students.

When I speak to our lecturers, there are a few future video uses that are of particular interest. First, a number of our lecturers want to start flipping the classroom and experimenting with blended learning formats. We’re setting up a space where academics can record these types of sessions to better support blended approaches. We’re also working on providing guidance on how to best adapt a face-to-face session to make it suitable for online consumption. We have two new postgraduate courses that want to move to either blended or fully online approaches. For instance, we have a Sports Cardiology course (only the second of its kind in Europe) and the idea is that we will record all of their content over a few days and then combine virtual delivery with some real-world learning support.

Second, we already have some Occupational Therapy students who are using Panopto to record themselves interacting with mock patients (played by actors) so they can use the recording for self-reflection. We could potentially expand support for this, so that we can start using Panopto as an integral part of some student assessments, where the medium would be appropriate. Initial discussions with some academics indicates they are positive about this.

Our future with Panopto

As well as implementing the newer video uses I’ve mentioned above, we are looking into how we can integrate Panopto with our lecture timetable so we can much more fully automate the recording process. At the moment, on our side we don’t yet have the timetabling data we need, but we are looking into this further, taking advice from the Panopto technical support team.

Other key aspirations are to make more use of Panopto analytics to better understand how students are using the system, investigate captioning options to enhance accessibility and start introducing quizzing elements into some of our recordings. If we do this last one, then we’d need to link it to the gradebook facility within Canvas so these quizzes have the potential to feed into student assessments.

One of our partner universities, the University of Nicosia Medical School in Cyprus, has expressed an interest in also having access to Panopto for some courses, so we are exploring the possibility of sharing recordings across institutions.

We are also keen to get even more actively involved with the Panopto community to share best practice. We have already visited and contacted some newer Panopto users to help raise awareness of the possibilities it offers and it’s great that we can all share our experiences to improve video learning for our students even further.

 Not using Panopto’s industry-leading video learning platform yet? You can request a free trial today and see how Panopto can support established and emerging teaching methodologies that enhance the learning experience for your students.

The post Using Panopto To Improve Teaching And Learning For Medical Students appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

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When it comes to learning, faculty members can make tough students. Between research, teaching and mentorship, it’s not always easy to get PhDs to sign up just to learn about a new piece of university technology or the next campus initiative. And that challenge can be even greater for professional development and internal sessions on broader topics like campus leadership or communication skills.

While just managing schedules is difficult enough, of even greater concern is the learning experience — once everyone is finally on-board and in the same room together, how can you ensure that your faculty members are getting the most out of their time?

A new answer to this challenge may lie with the teachers themselves. University faculty have been ahead of most when it comes to simplifying the way information is delivered, and many of them already have put new tools to work to make learning easier on both themselves and their students. By flipping their classrooms, instructors have created learning environments that prioritize discussion and engagement–peer to peer, social learning–over lecture and passive notetaking.

And in doing so, they’ve also provided a new model anyone involved in faculty development should be paying close attention to.

Motivating busy people to learn

The flipped classroom accomplishes a more engaged classroom experience by giving scheduled class time over to discussion by providing basic information upfront via pre-recorded videos. This gives the learner an opportunity to review the information at their own pace, and repeat it as often as they deem necessary. Moving the lecture ahead of class time then frees the professor to engage more active learning strategies in the classroom, and allows students to connect more deeply and personally with the topic at hand.

The flipped classroom may have been designed for students, but its application has real value for any learning experience. And for a busy university professor, what could be better than the freedom to pursue learning content on their own schedule, then utilize scheduled PD sessions to consider and discuss what they’ve learned in greater depth?

Whether the pre-recorded lecture provides all of the development content or just a piece of it, following the flipped learning model can help faculty arrive to sessions primed and ready to discuss what they have learned. The flipped classroom frees more advanced learners from having to sit through a lecture which is, for them, repetitive, while simultaneously getting newer learners up-to-speed. In this way, everyone arrives at the in-person training on even footing.

Accountability ensures that everyone respects each other’s time

For those participants who might need an extra nudge to complete the pre-session work, the right video platform can help trainers establish accountability for their participants. Interactive elements like quizzes can help check for understanding, while a prompt to submit questions can help a trainer gauge which individuals are fully prepared for the in-person session and remind those who may be falling behind.

Having completed the preliminary materials ahead of time also offers participants the option to submit questions, comments, and feedback, allowing the trainer to gauge the knowledge of the audience and to customize the in-person training.

With a firm understanding of the basics, and time to allow the ideas to marinate, the in-person segment of the professional development can be used to best effect. Knowing that everyone has viewed the preliminary content, trainers can speak to a broader audience without worrying about boring some learners while overwhelming others. They can respond to questions and optimize their presentation.

By moving the basics to the pre-session, trainers and participants alike ensure that everyone’s time is respected and that the training is as informative and relevant as possible.

An engaged student learns better — especially when they’re faculty

Once in the classroom, having flipped your session means in-person professional development time can be used in a variety of ways, from a deeper dive into the content all the way to small-group discussion and debate.

Highly engaged faculty members, having developed comfort with the content, can now dive into nuance, using one another to better learn. In turn, this peer-to-peer learning process increases comprehension and retention for everyone involved. Facilitators, meanwhile, can serve as guides to the content, prompting further discussions with more advanced questions, and offering clarifications for groups or individuals that may get stuck on a concept.

Building a campus culture with social learning

When participants engage with one another in a professional development session, you unlock your faculty’s collective brain power. Participants move from passive recipients of information to become active generators of new knowledge.

A quick presentation at the end of the day might hope to capture some of that energy and share it with the colleagues across campus. Here too, video can amplify the effect of this social learning strategy. With nothing more than the smartphone in their hand, small groups can record their thoughts on video and submit them to the group, or capture their key summaries and share them for others to review later.

Combining a trainer’s curatorial skill with a searchable video content management system, the best knowledge generated in your PD session can live on forever, shaping campus culture long after the day has passed.

They already do it. Now they expect it.

While a trainer in the corporate environment might expect to struggle with an audience that lacks experience in using a video content management system, in this area, academics are far ahead of their corporate counterparts. A quarter of all teachers now flip at least some element of their classrooms, and even those faculty that haven’t flipped have at least explored a MOOC or had one of their lectures recorded. In many cases, the same video platform used by professors to flip their classrooms and make lecture content available on-demand will be the same tool that you can use in flipping their learning experiences as well.

20 of The World’s Top 25 Universities Choose Panopto

Born at Carnegie Mellon University and deployed across university campuses around the world, Panopto is already in the hands of millions of end users. It is an all-in-one platform that integrates lecture capture, video editing, and video content management on any Mac, PC, iOS or Android device.

If your university is already using Panopto for lecture capture, you’re already primed to flip professional development on campus. If you’re not using Panopto, contact a member of our team to request a free trial for your university.

The post When Faculty Are Students: Flipping Professional Development appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Congratulations are in order! Your trained and knowledgeable sales team has identified a prospect, conveyed your value, converted that prospect into a lead, and now closed that sale. Job’s done, right?

Well, close but not quite.

For most businesses, retaining that customer is just as critical as signing them in the first place. Strong renewal rates drive up customer lifetime value, and in turn allow organizations to realize more revenue from every sale — enabling them to invest in product development, increase spend in marketing and sales, and any number of other benefits.

Of course, in a competitive marketplace, renewals are no sure thing. Your customers are likely hearing about the competition every day — in the news, from their colleagues and peers, and in the direct sales outreach that constantly fills up their email and voicemail inboxes.

Many sales enablement teams have responded to this changing sales landscape by adapting to become an ongoing knowledge base for their customers, offering helpful, tailored content that goes beyond sales collateral and helps them establish credibility and differentiate their organizations through superior customer experience.

Insider tips, how-to videos, and previews of coming features.

Want to become an essential part of your customers’ businesses? Help your clients become experts.

Teaching new customers how to get the most out of your product, where to find those helpful features that are often overlooked, and new ways they might use it are all essential customer service functions that your sales team can and should contribute to. Video makes sharing all those “secrets of the specialists” easy — eliminating the need for lengthy how-to manuals and instead simply letting clients see exactly what to do.

In most sales relationships, your contact will become your champion in their organization. Ensuring your contact truly understands your product not only ensures they get the maximum value from your relationship but also helps them sell your product to others inside their own organization. Likewise, giving your clients an inside edge on what’s new, what’s changing, and what’s coming next helps them better prepare their own teams for any updates and avoid any after-the-fact surprises.

Ongoing communications and routine check-ins.

In every customer’s lifecycle, there are dozens of moments your team can use to reinforce your relationship, identify potential trouble spots, and work to ensure that renewals are quick and easy.

Including video helps to personalize your team’s communications, and can humanize your company against a sea of otherwise faceless competitors.

The result: online customer service experiences that exceed expectations, increasing brand appreciation and word-of-mouth marketing.

Learn More Ways You Can Support Your Sales Ops With Video

Find out how you can use video to help your sales team — including 18 ways you can use video to enhance the way your organization does sales enablement — in our white paper.

Get your free copy today!

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Over the last few years, the flipped classroom has rapidly gained popularity among teachers and school administrators. According to recent studies, 1 in 5 teachers are considering flipping their classrooms, with 1 in 4 school administrators are interested in implementing this trend. And according to the THE Journal, the number of active members on the Flipped Learning Network’s Ning site has grown from just 2,500 to more than 15,000 since January 2012.

But what is a flipped classroom, exactly?

In flipped classrooms, also known as inverted classrooms, students review lecture materials before class as homework. In-class time is dedicated to discussions, interactive exercises, and independent work that would have previously been completed at home — all under the guidance of the teacher, who is present and available to respond to any questions that may arise.

The materials reviewed prior to class can take the form of recorded lectures, curated videos, reading assignments, video broadcasts — any material that the instructor assigns as relevant to the topic at hand.

Why are teachers flipping for the flipped classroom?

What makes the flipped classroom so compelling for many instructors is the improvement in the student experience. Flipping the classroom enables educators to improve the classroom experience in a number of ways.

1. Flipped classes allow students to consume lecture materials at their own pace. Unlike traditional lectures in which students are beholden to the instructor’s pace, students in flipped classrooms can rewind and replay the video as many times as needed in order to improve their understanding of difficult concepts.
2. Students apply new knowledge using the instructor as a resource. In traditional classroom environments, students usually apply new knowledge on their own through homework. There are two problems with this traditional approach. First, students at home typically do not have access to resources for help or questions if any problems arise. Second, when students turn in incomplete or incorrect homework, instructors have little insight into what went wrong. By bringing homework into the classroom, students are able to get help quickly, and teachers can identify common problem areas in order to adjust material accordingly.
3. Flipping the classroom works. A growing number of studies show that flipped classroom scenarios can improve student achievement in nearly any subject. According to the Flipped Learning Network, 71% of teachers who flipped their classes noticed improved grades, and 80% reported improved student attitudes as a result. What’s more, 99% of teachers who flipped their classes reported that they would flip their classes again the following year.

For educators planning to make the flip, one question to resolve is the technology needed to deliver course content to their students. Video plays a major role in the majority of flipped classrooms, and as such, schools must consider the platform used to record and stream video content to their students. Without a plan to manage the technical aspects of managing a flipped classroom, educators risk limiting the benefits to this new pedagogical style.

Technical Considerations For Flipped Classrooms

If you’re interested in knowing what technology you’ll need to flip your classes, download our latest free white paper, So You’ve Decided to Flip Your Classroom: 5 Technology Considerations You’ll Need to Succeed. In it, you’ll learn the foundational strategy for inverted classrooms, along with the five most important technologies schools should consider when researching or implementing the flip.

And if you’re interested in experiencing what the world’s fastest-growing video platform for education can do for you, contact our team for a free, full-featured 30-day trial.

The post What Is a Flipped Classroom? appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

FREE WEBINAR: Join Dave Dumler from the Panopto team on Friday, September 28, 2018 at 1pm ET / 10am PT to learn some compelling new ways to use video to accelerate and improve the employee training and onboarding process. Registration is free but space is limited. Reserve your spot today.

U.S. companies spent more than $70 billion on training in 2016. Larger organizations with more than 10,000 employees drove much of that spending, boasting training budgets that averaged $13 million.

With so much being invested in employee training, you might be surprised to learn that nearly 90% of new skills are lost and forgotten within a year.

The good news is that it’s not necessarily the budget that determines the success or failure of corporate training programs. There is both an art and a science to teaching and learning, as experienced learning and development (L&D) professionals know well.

No organization is immune to training challenges. And of course, no two organizations will struggle with the same set of challenges — the hurdles any L&D team faces change as the size of the business increases and as its growth accelerates.

Regardless, there are commonalities that experts have observed across nearly all businesses. We’ve compiled the seven most common reasons employee training fails, with ideas for addressing each that can help you make your training programs more successful.

7 Reasons Why Training Can Fail

1. Limited Time and Competing Priorities

Employees are continually working to prioritize sometimes overwhelming lists of tasks and meetings, and typically training sessions take a back seat to anything that directly supports the business. Every trainer has heard “schedule conflicts” blamed for flagging attendance.

Fail-proof Training Tip: Look for ways to make training more flexible. Record employee training sessions and make them available to employees on-demand so they can attend virtually when their schedules allow it.

2. Lack of Interest

Many employee training programs struggle with a lack of interest from workers who fail to see the value or benefits of training courses to their personal success. Other employees may leave sessions early or simply skip classes outright if they perceive it to be boring or low-value.

Fail-proof Training Tip: While there is no silver bullet for getting employees more engaged in training, strategically marketing your training programs to employees and getting support from managers across the business will go a long way. Employees need to see how the training benefits them, so it doesn’t get pushed to the bottom of their priority list. And if you’re experimenting with e-learning or video training, be sure to give employees a preview to get them excited.

3. Limited Budget and Training Resources

Corporate trainers are learning to do more with less as budgets get slashed year after year. In 2016 businesses in the U.S. increased their focus on training, yet budgets remained the same from the previous year. You know all the steps you need to take to make a training program successful — from design to implementation —  but you will have to cut some corners.

Fail-proof Training Tip: In terms of the average number of hours required to develop a learning experience for employees, creating instructional video content is by far both the quickest and the cheapest. If you’re trying to maximize learning throughout your organization while minimizing costs, a video platform will help you do more with less.

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4. Information Overload

In order to maximize resources available and minimize logistical expenses, it’s common for companies to offer intensive day(s)-long training programs. The reality is that people simply can’t absorb and remember all of that information in that amount of time, meaning even more than usual of what’s taught will be quickly forgotten and lost.

Fail-proof Training Tip: Test video-based microlearning training methods, which can improve both learning and retention. Producing short, memorable training videos that present bursts of information in 5 to 10 minute chunks is easy with the right video presentation recording software. And best of all, when an employee inevitably forgets something shared in those lessons, they’ll simply be able to re-watch the video on-demand as needed to learn it again.

5. Lack of Planning and Poor Timing

Ever heard the phrase “we’re flying the plane while we’re building it?” This concept of “ship it, then fix it, then ship it again” was born in Silicon Valley and has become a standard business practice in many businesses working hard to stay ahead of the game. Chances are your L&D teams will not have the luxury of carefully planning and strategically executing formal training programs throughout the organization 100 percent of the time.

Fail-proof Training Tip: Equip your organization with the right tools for social learning. Employees actually learn 20% of what they need to know from collaboration and feedback from colleagues, so be sure to make it as easy as possible for your teams to share what their knowledge and learn from their peers.

6. Neglecting What Happens After Training

When employees don’t use the skills they’ve learned after training, knowledge decay sets in very quickly. New skills have to be practiced and applied. Without a strategy for reinforcing new skills after the training ends, 90% of what your employees were taught could be lost.

Fail-proof Training Tip: Design follow-up activities and testing that reinforce learned skills after the training ends. Also be sure to make training materials available to employees through a central knowledge base so they can reference training they may have forgotten when they are ready to apply it. More and more L&D teams are recording employee training videos and archiving them in a searchable video content management system — this lets employees not only revisit the training exactly as it happened but also saves the training team time by reducing the need to create written documentation for employees who aren’t able to attend the class in-person.

7. Relying On Technology To Do The Work For You

Sometimes we want to believe that technology will solve all our training problems, but a mobile app or even e-learning authoring tool alone will not guarantee the success of a corporate training program. And selecting technology that doesn’t align with the company’s specific needs can also be a mistake.

Fail-proof Training Tip: Perform a  training-needs assessment before purchasing new technologies. The types of skills gaps you have within your organization will dictate the technologies you need most to help maximize learning within your organization. Look for employee training technologies that can support the instructional design of your core programs before, during, and after training.

Learn More About Using Video For Employee Training

In our complete white paper, The Beginner’s Guide To Using Video For Employee Training, we help L&D practitioners make the business case for doing more with video, including:

• 5 benefits that help convince your decision makers to use video in more ways for L&D
• 14 ideas for supporting and scaling formal and informal learning with video
• 1 technology — the video platform — that simplifies the use of video for L&D

Today’s learning and development professionals already understand the potential that video technology offers. Make sure your organization isn’t missing out!

Download your free copy today!

The post Why Employee Training Fails And How To Prevent It In Your Organization appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Across enterprises today, using video in the workplace is becoming the norm. For every person in an organization, the application varies: salespeople use video to reach out to contacts and customers when they can’t meet in person, executives use video to communicate earnings results and reorganizations, and employees use it to get up-to-speed and share their expertise with their peers.

It seems that, in one way or another, everyone is taking an interest in video. Forrester Research recently published a report based on references from leading companies that are using enterprise video platforms to accomplish one or more of any number of tasks, including those listed above. What Forrester found was that while interest in video is ubiquitous throughout organizations, implementation is most often fragmented across subsidiaries, departments and job function use cases.

Forrester suggests that companies that have piloted video now have an opportunity to develop comprehensive video strategies, leveraging maturing enterprise video platforms. These video content management systems, which can integrate with content and learning management systems, handle recording, editing, storage and distribution of video inside and outside the corporate environment.

Enterprise leans heavily on video to communicate with both potential customers and employees, making video available both in real-time and on-demand.

Companies Are Getting More Sophisticated About Planning and Distributing Video Both Internally and Externally

Enterprises are using video to communicate with a host of stakeholders both external and internal. For each audience group, Forrester found that most customers were both broadcasting live and making videos available on-demand. For customer- and other external-facing video, live video was slightly more popular, while on-demand Enterprise YouTube video was preferred for employee and internal-facing video content.

With no shortage of social media platforms and white-labeled video hosting services, companies have traditionally distributed their customer-facing videos on sites like YouTube and other hosting services. While public video websites like YouTube are effective for distributing video tutorials, advertisements and archived webinars, they present a number of issues for the vast majority of companies that need to protect intellectual property and trade secrets contained within their video content.

For internal video, companies often still feel forced to turn to traditional file storage with links from enterprise social and collaboration networks to actually share video content. Modern enterprise video platforms have sophisticated security and permissions tools that make sharing confidential video with select internal audiences possible. Forrester found that even companies operating in highly regulated environments are increasingly moving to these cloud-based systems, allowing individuals to record, upload and even webcast video from any device.

Companies are increasingly making video recording and posting available to all employees through enterprise video platforms.

Related Reading: Untangling the Complexities of Enterprise Video Streaming To Meet Growing Demand

Enterprise is, For the First Time, Opening Up the Production of Video — and the Sharing of Knowledge — to All of Their Employees

A second significant consideration that Forrester identified as a trend for customers deploying enterprise video is the rapidly rising importance of employee access to video recording and sharing tools inside the workplace.

Traditionally, video has been the purview of creative and media services departments, with teams of videographers, producers and editors managing the production process from beginning to end. While video hosting solutions sometimes allowed companies to create a portal for their employees to consume video, they typically don’t provide a way for employees to record and share their own video content with their colleagues.

Increasingly, corporations are realizing that the production of video need not be kept under lock and key. Employees, who often use video in their personal lives to chat with friends and preserve family moments, are eager to create and share knowledge at work too. And leading companies are embracing this desire.

By providing video-based social learning software, corporations can leverage their employee’s expertise in a way that can be saved for later use, whether that’s two weeks or two years later. This is especially effective in capturing the institutional knowledge of outgoing employees and the subsequent onboarding of new team members to take their place.

Today, more than 32% of companies surveyed in Forrester’s report allow all employees to post video, with more intending to do so.

While many companies have yet to address the demand video creates on their network, WAN Optimization and Modern Streaming are emerging as the clear way forward.

Companies Are Producing and Consuming More Video Than Ever. How Can IT Professionals Ensure Corporate Networks Keep Up with Demand?

Video now makes up more than 57% of all Internet traffic. That’s little surprise to anyone who has enjoyed a movie at home with Netflix or watched a YouTube video while on the go.

But video is rapidly flooding corporate networks, presenting a major technical challenge for IT professionals. Gartner predicts that by next year, the average employee will stream over 16 hours of video each and every month.

Over the years, vendors have offered no shortage of technologies to help their customers deliver video across an intranet. With fragmentation and long-term uncertainty about the technical delivery of video across networks, it’s no wonder more than 25% of businesses surveyed in the Forrester report had yet to implement a network solution to support the growing use of video.

Fortunately, out of the noise of legacy video protocols and the confusion of evolving network infrastructure requirements, a clear answer is emerging. Modern HTTP-Based Streaming presents a series of new opportunities for organizations to use existing network infrastructure for more scalable, cost-effective video delivery, and may just be the key to helping today’s organizations keep pace with the rapid rise of video in the workplace.

To learn more about the latest trends in Modern Streaming and network optimization, download a free copy of our white paper: “Modern Video Streaming in the Enterprise: Protocols, Caching, and WAN Optimization.”

Enterprise Video is Prepared to Makes Waves

By holistically examining enterprise video strategy utilizing a video content management system like Panopto, organizations can better manage their institutional expertise, market to potential customers across the Internet, and help salespeople reach their goals, all without sacrificing security or cannibalizing network bandwidth.

To learn more about how Panopto video platform can help your business unlock the potential of enterprise video, contact a member of our team to request a free trial today.

The post Beyond the Tipping Point: How Modern Organizations Leverage Video Streaming Technology appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

In the U.S., April 15 looms on the calendar like a boss who tends to micro-manage a little too much. It’s a date marks the annual undertaking of one of but only two certainties in life — the deadline for filing state and federal income taxes.

Here in the states, taxes have earned a reputation as quite possibly the single most confusing process most people will attempt. There are multiple official filing forms, only a handful of which are relevant to any particular taxpayer. And even after a concerted effort by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to make the forms easier to understand, most every line on each document is still either littered with accounting jargon or now just frustratingly vague.

Worst of all, even the materials meant to help explain things only end up creating more confusion. Just look, for example, at the supporting materials for Form 1040A — itself a short, two-page form — supplemented with an 84-page instructional PDF.

If someone isn’t going to be able to figure out a 1040A, what is the likelihood that an 84-page FAQ is going to help?

Fortunately for U.S. taxpayers, there’s a better way. Accounting firms, tax preparers, and a number of nonprofit organizations have worked to make it easier to understand how to complete a tax form — by tapping the power of video as a teaching tool.

A perfect example comes in this video from Laws.com, explaining all of how to complete the 1040A in just under 3 minutes. The recording uses a sharp combination of PowerPoint slides to introduce the essential information up front, then adds a simple screen recording to illustrate how the form should be filled out, step by step. In minutes, the video makes it easy to understand what took 84 pages to explain in text.

Are Your Organization’s HR Forms Any Easier to Complete Than Today’s Tax Returns?

It’s tempting to think that the problems of the IRS are the standard stuff of bureaucratic inefficiency — relics of the processes that modern organizations improved upon decades ago.

But don’t be so sure.

In many organizations, dozens — sometimes hundreds — of processes still rely on the same form-driven data processes that guide modern taxpaying. Federal forms like the I9 and W4 are obvious examples, as are employee benefits forms like 401k enrollment and update forms, healthcare and life insurance benefit enrollment forms, dozens of other personnel paperwork.

Even if your organization has digitized the process for these and no longer requires actual paperwork, that doesn’t solve the problem. Digital forms are still forms — and still require that employees comprehend and complete them.

That’s a problem with a real cost associated. For most employees, filling out benefits enrollment forms correctly is a serious concern — something they (and you) absolutely do not want to get wrong. As such, most will tie up your human resources teams with question after question as they work hard to get each detail right — eating into the time HR staff has available for other projects.

Some organizations, especially those that hire regularly, try to minimize the random benefits questions that come in by making enrollment part of onboarding — but that too has a cost, requiring the organization to have a dedicated staff just for helping other employees complete a form.

Ensuring Forms Are Completed Correctly Is An Everyday Task in Most Organizations

Even beyond benefits enrollments, most organizations are awash in forms of some sort or another — adding people to an email list requires a form, updating laptops or mobile devices requires a form, expense accounts require a form, business travel requires a form, and that barely scratches the surface.

And those are just the simple forms — in a larger sense, many of the tools we rely on in our daily work are really just a complex web of forms. CRM tools like Salesforce, CMS tools like SharePoint, marketing automation software like Eloqua — all these are tools built around managing and executing information from a set of individual forms.

Worse still, at most organizations, there is little better than the IRS’s 84-page support manual when it comes to helping employees use any of these forms — no matter how complex or simple, no matter how essential or not it is to daily work, most organizations don’t offer any easy way for employees to learn how to correctly complete everything required.

And that’s a shame because as Laws.com has shown in the example above, even federal income tax forms can be explained in less than 3 minutes with video.

Video Makes Teaching Employees How to Complete Forms Easy — And Easy to Repeat

With a quick video, your HR team — and another team that relies on forms in your organization — can walk through each and every document your employees will need to complete, and provide comprehensive step-by-step guidance, without the 84-page PDF.

By making the training materials visual, video helps make the steps easier to understand — ensuring that more employees complete your forms correctly the first time.

By recording the training for each form, your organization can make those materials available anytime, anywhere, on-demand in your secure corporate video library. You can even provide links to the videos from your documents themselves, to make sure employees can quickly access them.

And by storing those videos in your video library, you can enable employees to search and find relevant moments inside those recordings. Panopto’s video search capability indexes every word spoken and every word shown on-screen for every video in your library (whether or not it was recorded with Panopto) — helping your team members find and instantly fast-forward to the answer for any question they may have.

Best of all, video can help you give time back to your HR team to focus on new and high-value projects, instead of answering the same FAQs over and over again. Especially for larger organizations, it’s an ROI that will speak for itself.

See How Video Can Make Your Organization’s Onboarding Process Easier

More compelling than a handbook and more cost-effective than on-location events and seminars, video is one of the best employee onboarding investments a company can make. Download our whitepaper and learn how the right video platform can help you transform your onboarding process by making it easier and more consistent.

DOWNLOAD: 15 Ways To Enhance Employee Onboarding With Video

The post Is Your HR Paperwork As Hard To Complete As A Tax Return? appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

It’s happened to everyone.

You’ve sat attentively through a meeting or a class. You’ve taken page after page of notes. You’ve fought through the hand cramps (if you’re a traditionalist), or the temptation to check Facebook (if you’re the modern type).

But when the session ended and you stepped out the door, you’ve been struck with a funny realization — you can’t remember a single thing that was just said.

The good news is, you aren’t alone. In fact, new research has begun to suggest that instant-forgetfulness is actually common for almost everyone — and that it might be the act of taking notes itself that’s to blame.

Bloomberg Business summarizes the findings in a recent article, Taking Notes Kills Your Memory. The human brain, it appears, is wired to recognize when information is being documented, and to “intentionally forget” that info so as to be able to free up room for other things. The brain assumes that since the information is written down, there’s no need to remember it.

While it’s true that one of the benefits of taking notes is creating a reference for later, these findings should give us all reason to pause and reconsider the rationale most of us offer for taking notes in the first place — to help us remember. It turns out, taking notes instead may simply be signaling to our brain instead to forget everything as quickly as we can write it down.

So Written Notes Don’t Work.

What does, then?

Study after study has shown that the best way to help the brain remember is to actively engage with the information.

In school, that might mean thinking critically about information presented and answering questions in class, participating in discussions or experiments, and discussing the materials with peers.

At work, that often means actively participating in meetings, sharing ideas and asking for clarifications, and also taking in colleague’s complete presentations, so as to be able to critique the overall proposal.

In both cases, taking notes gets in the way of that level of cognitive engagement with the materials at hand. Writing out notes commands focus on individual points rather than overarching themes.

Given the findings above, taking notes may be the worst of all options — not only do you miss the big picture, but you let your brain know it’s okay to forget the details too.

Active participation in your classroom or conference room corrects that learning behavior, signaling to your brain that this material is absolutely important to consider and remember. And it never hurts to get recognized as the person who’s willing to speak up, ask questions, and share ideas.

What About Creating A Reference Document?

While it’s likely that we won’t always need the notes from any given meeting or class, it certainly is nice to have something to fall back on. And that’s where technology can make things a whole lot easier.

Today’s schools and universities have pioneered a new means of recording the details of their classrooms, tapping video to capture class sessions in full. Thanks to inexpensive cameras and simple, flexible video platforms like Panopto, lecture capture has become a regular part of many learning environments — enabling students to go back and rewatch anything they’ve missed, search for specific moments and concepts, and get access to every last detail covered, without needing to put pen to paper.

Best of all, by eliminating the need to take notes, lecture capture technology enables students to participate more freely in class. Northwest University has noted, “with Panopto in place, the stress of attempting to record or write down every last possible detail of each lecture was eliminated. Instead, students can focus on the central ideas of the discussion, internalizing the material more effectively.”

Many businesses, too, lean on the same technology to record meetings, discussions, conferences, and more. It’s an increasingly common way for professionals to record kick-off meetings, project discussions, and other essential project conversations. With a simple webcam or mobile phone, participants can record the meeting in full — freeing themselves to participate actively knowing that the details will be captured. Those recorded meetings can then be quickly shared with selected participants and executives via the corporate YouTube for anyone who may want to revisit them.

Watch an example meeting recording below: Documenting A Tech Team Spec Review

Stop Making People Take Notes. 

Panopto’s video platform connects with any just about any recording device so you can capture and share important presentations and discussions by simply pressing record. Panopto automatically optimizes your videos for easy playback on any device and makes every word spoken or shown in the video searchable. So stop making your people take notes, and start capturing everything in a searchable video at the press of a button with Panopto.

To try Panopto at your business or university, contact our team today for a free 30-day trial.

The post Put Down That Notebook! New Studies Find Taking Notes Is Bad For Your Memory appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

There are plenty of good reasons to live stream and record real-time collaborations, trainings, and communications at work.

Live streaming a corporate event can improve engagement and enable people to attend who otherwise couldn’t be there in the room physically, unifying your workforce.

And with a video recording, you have an exact record of the event that you can then reference again later if you need to refresh your memory about something that was discussed. You can also share the recording with colleagues who either couldn’t be part of the original event or who may find the information covered useful later.

What’s more, recording a presentation means no one needs to take notes, so everyone in the audience can give the presenter their full attention. With a video recording of a meeting, training, or other communication, there’s no need to review and interpret either your own or someone else’s notes should you want to go back and reference the presentation later. Your video will enable you to replay everything, with no missing nuance and no filling in the blanks.

But the way we try to do all of this today is broken. We simply don’t have the right set of video tools at our disposal at work to do the things that could make us more productive and more informed.

What do we have?

Video conferencing software.

And I’m sorry to confirm that, as useful as it is, your video conferencing software can’t do everything.

When an eleventh-hour request comes in to live stream an upcoming all-hands meeting or a major employee training event, what do you do? If you’re like most of us, you open up your video conferencing software and bootstrap a live stream. Just invite your attendees, start up the meeting and enable recording.

Trouble is, while pressing your video conference tools into service may work just well enough for quick announcements and other informal scenarios with smaller audiences, the fact remains that video conferencing tools just weren’t designed to be live streaming solutions. Even if attendance caps aren’t a problem for you (most conferencing tools limit your meeting attendees to anywhere between 100 and 1000 viewers depending on your license), you’ll have to settle for a lower quality video feed that’s often choppy or grainy — not to mention fraught with interruptions like accidental hold music and notifications whenever someone joins or leaves.

Moreover, streaming and recording live video is typically all a video conferencing system can do. Few make it easy to share that video securely with others in your organization, or make it possible to search for specific content inside a recording. Few are built to support recording for live classrooms or big events, or to facilitate social learning exchanges among employees. And few help you bring your videos into your learning management system (LMS), content management systems (CMSs), or elsewhere in your IT ecosystem.

For anyone who has found themselves wishing their video conferencing software did more, there’s a solution.

A Video Platform Does What Your Video Conferencing Tools Can’t

A video platform is a perfect complement to your real-time video conferencing solution — whether you’re using Zoom, BlueJeans, Skype for Business, GoToMeeting, or anything else. With features that include secure video management, inside-video search, live streaming, and video editing, a video platform helps to improve productivity, knowledge sharing, and more by extending the value that live collaborations, trainings, and communications already have.

Put simply, a video platform gives everyone in your organization the ability to utilize video in ways they could not with video conferencing software alone.

Let’s look at 6 things you’ll be able to do when you add a video platform to your enterprise video ecosystem.

Automatically convert recordings for playback on any device.

One thing that video conferencing software doesn’t do is convert video recordings so they can be played by anyone using any device.  That’s a problem when many video conferencing solutions still record with proprietary file types that many of today’s laptops and mobile devices aren’t able to play without first installing additional third-party software. It’s something that’s often overlooked until you share a video file with co-workers only to get a few emails back saying that it won’t play.

Video files are more complex than basic text documents — they are large and there is no standard format that will play on every device. A video platform, however, can automatically transcode every video you record with your video conferencing software (even the proprietary file types), ensuring everything will be playable automatically on any Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, or Android.

Host all of your corporate videos in a central, secure library.

In most organizations, you can’t just send a video file to coworkers in an email. If it’s not too big to send, the person receiving it would still need to download the entire file before they can play it. As a result, videos captured with your conferencing software  — videos full of useful information and ideas — often end up scattered across various folders on your WAN, shared to a content management system like SharePoint (if they’re under the file size limit) or in another corporate file sharing system. Some may even end up on YouTube where, even if they’re set to “unlisted,” anyone with a link can access them!

A video platform hosts all of your video conference recordings in one secure place with no caps on file size or storage space. Folders can be created for different teams or departments and employee viewing permissions can be managed at scale. This ensures you never have to worry about sensitive internal meetings or communications getting shared publicly or with the wrong group of people.

Make every word spoken or shown in your videos searchable.

Most of the time, you don’t need to replay an entire meeting or communication — you only need to revisit a specific conversation that was captured in an hour-long recording. A video platform makes every word spoken and shown inside your video conference recordings searchable, which means you can search for a topic and jump to the exact moment it occurs in a particular video.

With video search and a central library for your conference recordings, anyone inside your company can find a discussion with information that’s relevant to a problem they are working on, in just a few seconds. Many companies are beginning to record all of their meetings and internal communications for this exact reason — it’s an effortless and passive way to share potentially valuable knowledge informally throughout the entire organization.

Live stream in HD at scale with one extra click.

Unlike video conferencing software, a video platform is designed for streaming live video at scale, which means it has everything you need to significantly improve the live streaming experience.

• Stream live high-definition video in 1080p at 60fps with one extra click to one or one million viewers.
• Give viewers the ability to view from the beginning if they join late or to rewind during the live broadcast with live DVR.
• Maximize engagement with both live Q&A and threaded discussions.

A video platform will also record your live videos automatically, then convert and upload them to your video library as soon as the recording ends, so your people can search and view the on-demand video almost immediately.

Edit live recordings prior to sharing them.

Almost every meeting or conference call starts with off-topic conversations and pleasantries, and often collaborative meetings can get side-tracked with discussion about something that gets tabled for later. Whatever the reason, you may not want to share a video conference recording in its entirety or without a little editing. A video platform that includes simple video editing software makes it easy for anyone to cut out unwanted conversations, to splice in new video that explains something in more depth, or to add links and comments that give a viewer more complete information if they want to go further.

Integrate video into everything.

When you integrate a video platform into your existing technology ecosystem, you’ll be bringing the missing pieces of the video puzzle into the tools everyone already uses. Automatically convert and upload all of your video conference recordings to your searchable video library. Make your video library searchable and accessible from within your LMS or CMS. And when you integrate your video platform with your identity management solution, you can both manage permissions for internal videos at scale and enable employees to view restricted video content with the login they already use for everything. (Just make sure your video platform includes and supports integrations for the systems you currently use, or offers an API that lets you customize how your technologies work together).

Related Reading: Asynchronous vs. Synchronous Video Communications: What’s The Difference?

Recording and sharing information is good for business — video can make employee training scalable, onboarding more cost-efficient and consistent, executive communications more engaging, and it can super-charge the sharing of knowledge across teams and even continents. And while businesses are recording a record amount of video content today, they would be recording and sharing a lot more if they had the right set of tools at their disposal.

“Plan For Video Content, Not Just Video Conferencing.”

As video continues to grow in importance across every department at most organizations, now is the time to heed the advice of Forrester Research: “plan for video content, not just video conferencing.”

So what are the right video tools for your organization? Find out, with Gartner’s Meeting Solutions Magic Quadrant report and Panopto’s Video is More Than Video Conferencing guide.

Click here to download free copies of both reports.

The post Sorry, Your Video Conferencing Software Can’t Do It All appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Creating a blended learning program can be time-consuming. Between creating course modules, designing a curriculum, and getting trainers on board, implementing an effective program often requires weeks of planning and cross-department coordination.

Unfortunately, for all the time and effort spent, some L&D organizations struggle to drive eLearning adoption within their companies. So what can your organization do to ensure that your blended learning and eLearning content is being used and that employees are deriving value from it?

Market Your Blended Learning Program

Your curriculum can’t be successful if no one knows about your program or signs up for the courses. Therefore, it’s essential that you develop a strong internal marketing strategy to promote your new eLearning program. Share overviews of the training modules you’re offering and provide details on specific parts of your course content that potential learners will find most relevant.

As you develop your marketing plan, be sure to communicate the benefits of the blended/hybrid learning approach compared to the in-person training that employees may have experienced in the past. Some employees may be wary of change, particularly if eLearning is new to your company. Consider creating a wiki page, email, or short explainer video that highlights the benefits of eLearning, such as increased knowledge retention, the ability to access learning precisely when it’s needed, and the ability to learn at an individual pace. Use information from industry research and other resources to get employees excited about training and the value they’ll derive from participating.

You’ll also want to make sure that you continue to market your hybrid learning program beyond the initial campaigns, lest your program be seen as just a passing fad. Send out regular updates regarding upcoming courses and new training content, and always be sure to reiterate the importance of training to both personal and professional development.

Engage eLearning Evangelists and Advocates

Research shows that employees are influenced most by the colleagues that they trust, so having the right person in your corner can work wonders for driving eLearning adoption at your company. Find advocates outside of your department that other employees trust and follow, and speak to them about the importance of training overall, and of your program, specifically. Make sure that your advocates understand the impact that your program will have on their teams, as well as the company as a whole. Finally, work with your champions to develop ways to effectively drive your message to their teams. We recommend having your advocates use your video platform to create short recordings introducing the new curriculum that you can then use in your marketing campaigns.

Involve Management at All Stages

Employees will be more likely to participate in a blended learning program when they know that it has the support of management. And managers will be more apt to support training when they feel like the program was developed with their teams in mind. Therefore, we recommend involving managers at all steps of the program, starting from the first stages of course design. Pull managers in during the initial planning stages to determine their needs, as well as the specific skills gaps their teams could address through training. You can then use that feedback to tailor your course content and work on closing those gaps.

Watch an example eLearning video recorded with Panopto below: 

Further down the line, get managers even more involved in the curriculum by having them create short eLearning videos that are included as part of the training. And consider working with managers to create the right learner evaluation metrics, since they’ll be the ones ultimately determining whether the training had a positive impact on their teams. You may want to hold training sessions specifically for managers to learn which features of your company’s blended learning platform, such as video analytics, can be used to evaluate their employees’ progress during the training.

Celebrate Successes

Employees like to be appreciated for their actions. As learners begin to complete courses and make gains, be sure to share their successes across your team. Even small acknowledgments in internal company communications such as newsletters or on information portals can help build positive associations with your eLearning programs and inspire other employees to explore the training options available to them.

Better yet, have managers use your video platform to record short videos recognizing the training that their direct reports have received. Sharing successes with potential learners in this way further increases the visibility and interest in your program.

Interested in Using Video for Blended Learning at Your Company?

If you’re considering a blended approach to training at your company, Panopto can help. Our industry-leading video platform is currently in use at over 500 Fortune 500 companies and educational institutions all over the world. Our clients have access to a library of resources and tutorials that can be used to facilitate a successful rollout of Panopto at their organizations. To learn how Panopto can help you boost blended learning at your company, contact our team today to request a free 30-day trial.

The post How to Make Blended Learning A Success At Your Company appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

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TED Talks are great examples of high production quality online presentations and events. When you watch a presentation on TED.com, you see HD video of the presenter, and from time to time, you get a detailed view of the slides or videos they’re showing on their screen:

But from an online viewing perspective, TED Talks could be even better.

Ideally, you wouldn’t have to wait for the camera operator to switch from the presenter to their screen and back. Like viewers in the live audience, you’d be able to see the speaker and a clear view of their screen throughout the presentation.

The problem is that this would require TED to stream two tracks of video simultaneously – one of the presenter and one of their screen. It’s technically challenging and it eats up a lot of network bandwidth.

Delivering high-fidelity online events that conserve bandwidth is a challenge faced by corporate IT and AV teams as well. Today, most corporate events make effective use of network bandwidth, but they do so at the cost of a great viewing experience:

• Audio + screen webcasting is often used for corporate town halls, investor webcasts, and online training. With this approach, viewers see on-screen content, but not the presenter.
• Video + still image webcasting shows the presenter and a still image of their PowerPoint slide. This prevents viewers from seeing on-screen product demonstrations, videos shown on the presenter’s screen, and PowerPoint animations.

It’s Time To Update The TED Talk Experience

Panopto takes a different approach. In addition to supporting the basic webcasting scenarios above, our software can simultaneously stream two (or more) synchronized video tracks while also conserving network bandwidth. We accomplish this by optimizing each video track for what online viewers expect to see:

• Video of the presenter is optimized for a high frame rate. This ensures that viewers see the smooth motion of the speaker on stage.
• Video of the screen content is optimized for high resolution. This ensures that viewers can always see the fine details of on-screen text and graphics.

When combined with adaptive bitrate streaming and WAN caching, Panopto enables live streaming for businesses that includes 720p presenter video and 1080p screen video.

Presenter and screen are streamed simultaneously, optimizing for frame rate and resolution, respectively.

What’s even better? You don’t need any specialized AV equipment. Panopto can record and live stream multiple tracks of HD video from any PC using your existing video cameras.

So if you’re in corporate IT or events and looking for a better way to stream your online events, drop us a line. And TED team, if you happen to be reading this, we’d love to chat with you about making your already awesome online video experience even awesomer.

The post Better Than TED: Online Presentations Need A Makeover appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

The passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) in the United States in 1990 was intended to bring about sweeping change for people with physical and cognitive challenges, and in many ways, it did.

Cities, buildings, and businesses invested in structural changes to accommodate people in wheelchairs. Deaf children in public schools got interpreters and access to a better education. And media companies, corporations, and universities began captioning video content more consistently for the deaf or hard of hearing.

Video content, in particular, has changed since the inception of the ADA. Video once was a medium generally limited to television programming and physical video files like VHS tapes (and later, DVDs). But today, with online video platforms like Panopto, YouTube, and Vimeo, and a smartphone in nearly everyone’s pocket, people are creating and streaming video content more than ever.

Today, nearly 75% of all online traffic is streaming video.

Universities and businesses have expanded their use of video too, creating hundreds of new applications for video. Among the fastest-rising uses are teaching, training, and communicating.

With more and more educators and businesses using video as a professional tool for sharing instructional and informational content on-demand, video captioning has become a more important topic than ever before.

Google Trends for Interest in “Video Captions” in the U.S.

Specifically, the rise in video within education and business has spurred a lot of questions about video captioning and accessibility, from Section 508 compliance to ‘unlimited’ captioning services.

In this post, we review some of the most frequently asked questions we receive on the topic.

1. What is the difference between video transcription and captioning?
2. What is the difference between subtitles and captioning?
3. What is the difference between open and closed captioning?
4. Why Is captioning important?
5. What’s the difference between automatic speech recognition (ASR) captioning and human-edited captions?
6. How does captioning work in Panopto?
7. How long does it take to generate captions?
8. How easy is it to add captions to a video in Panopto?
9. What are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)?
10. What captioning quality is required for ADA, Section 508 compliance?
11. Does Panopto support best practices and Section 508 compliance for video captioning?
12. Can you change the style and position of captions in Panopto?
13. How does pricing for captioning work?
14. Are unlimited captioning services truly unlimited?

14 Frequently Asked Questions About Video Captioning

Q: What is the difference between video transcription and captioning?

Video transcription is the process of producing a text document from the words spoken in a video. Transcribed text does not have a time value associated with it. In terms of accessibility, transcription works well for audio-only media, but falls short when it comes to audio with moving content on a screen, such as voice-over-PowerPoint slides or video.

Video captioning converts the audio content within a video into text, then synchronizes the transcribed text to the video. When the recording is played, that text will be displayed in segments that are timed to align with specific words as they are spoken. Captioning is required to make video content accessible to viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing. Captions are also considered good universal design for learning as they benefit a wide variety of people in different situations.

Q: What is the difference between subtitles and captioning?

Captions show the words spoken in a video in the same language, while subtitles show the translation of words spoken in a different language. The words shown on the screen in a foreign film in another language, for example, are considered subtitles.

Q: What is the difference between open and closed captioning?

There are a few differences between open captioning and closed captioning in videos. Most notably, open captions are always on and in view, whereas closed captions can be turned off by the viewer. Open captions are part of the video itself, and closed captions are delivered by the video player or television (via a decoder). And unlike closed captions, open captions may lose quality when a video is encoded and compressed.

Q: Why Is captioning important?

In addition to making video content more accessible to viewers with impaired hearing, captioning can actually improve the effectiveness of video:

• Captions improve comprehension by native and foreign language speakers. An Ofcom study showed 80% of people who use video captions don’t even have a hearing disability.
• Captions help compensate for poor audio quality or background noise within a video.
• Captions make video useful when a person is watching with the sound off or viewing in a noisy environment that obscures the sound.
• Captions provide viewers with one way to search inside of videos.

Q: What’s the difference between automatic speech recognition (ASR) captioning and human-generated captions?

There are two important differences between ASR captioning (also referred to as machine-generated captions) and human-generated captions: the quality and the time required to generate captions.

Machine-generated captioning produces captions very quickly. Typically, captions can be created in about one-quarter of the total video length. For example, an hour-long video could be captioned using ASR in approximately 15 minutes.

ASR captions are typically 70-75% accurate depending on the audio quality in the recording. As a result, machine-generated captions are primarily intended to enable inside-video search, and by default, they aren’t added to the video as closed captions. Instead, the text is stored in the video platform’s database for use with the video search engine.

Of course, ASR also provides a starting point from which people can manually create 100% accurate captions. In video platforms like Panopto, text generated by ASR can be added to the video as closed captions, which people can then edit.

Human-generated captions take substantially longer to produce but provide results that are at least 99% accurate. In some cases, human-generated captions can be turned around in 24 hours, but typically, you can expect a 2-5 day turnaround.

If you are required to meet Section 508 requirements for accessibility, you will need to use human-generated captions to guarantee your captions meet the minimum quality standards.

Q: How does captioning work in Panopto?

You can caption videos in Panopto a couple different ways.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)

Every video uploaded into Panopto (whether it was created with Panopto or not) is machine-transcribed using ASR technology. This provides the backbone for our video search technology, which means you can search inside the spoken content of every video you upload into Panopto.

Human-generated captioning

Panopto also gives you a few options for human-generated captioning, which meet Section 508 compliance guidelines for accuracy.

Option 1: Request 508-compliant video captioning right inside Panopto

For individual videos, you can request human-generated captions from within our online video editor. After your Panopto administrator sets up the captioning integration with us or one of our captioning partners, captioning can be requested with just a few clicks. Simply choose the captioning turn-around time and, when the human-generated captions are ready, they will automatically appear inside your video.

Human-generated captions can also be requested for all videos within a particular Panopto folder. Once configured, any new videos added to a folder will be automatically captioned. Similar to captioning requests for individual videos, your administrator can select and set a specific turnaround time for captioning the videos added to that folder.

Option 2: Manually upload human-generated captions to your video in the editor

You may have a different third-party captioning partner that you prefer, or one with which you already have a contract. Or you may even have people on staff to manually edit machine-generated captions for accuracy. In either case, you can easily upload the human-generated caption file through our online video editor. Panopto supports the SRT, ASHX, and DXFP captioning formats.

Q: How long does it take to generate captions?

Machine-generated captions can be generated in a quarter of the time it takes to play the video. If your organization chooses to process videos in batches overnight to conserve network bandwidth during peak hours, your captions may not be ready until the following day.

Human-generated captions are typically generated within two to five days, depending on the requested turnaround time and service options. Some human-generated captioning services can expedite 508-compliant captioning, turning it around in just 24 hours.

Q: How easy is it to add captions to a video in Panopto?

Generating or importing captions in Panopto can be done with just a few clicks of your mouse.

Adding machine-generated captions:

You can add machine-generated captions within seconds In our online video editor. Simply select “Captions” from the menu on the left side and choose “Import Automatic Captions” from the dropdown as shown below. Once the ASR-generated captions have populated, click “Publish” and you’re done.

Adding human-generated captions from one of our partners:

You can request human-generated captioning from us or one of our captioning partners just as easily. Depending on turn-around time, you can caption your videos through Panopto for as little as $1/minute. Faster turn-around time will cost slightly more but we pass our discounts along to you, ensuring you get affordable video captioning rates.  All you need to do is choose the turnaround time from the drop-down next to “Service level,” shown below:

And with Panopto it’s easy to automate video captioning at scale — your administrator simply enables captioning for a specific folder or for your entire video library.

Uploading human-generated captions from another source:

If you are using another third-party captioning service or editing your captions in-house, you can upload a human-edited caption file just as easily as you can request captioning. In this scenario, you click “Captions” in the left-hand menu, choose the caption file you need to upload from your computer and select “Upload Captions.”

Q: What are Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and how do they relate to captioning?

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, also known as the WCAG standard, is the most detailed and widely adopted guide for creating accessible web content. While WCAG does not yet dictate legal requirements for making online video accessible in the United States, it is often followed by educational institutions and businesses as a best-practice, and has been referenced by laws in several European countries.

WCAG 2.0 generally asks that online content meet four principles that improve accessibility for people with disabilities and also adhere to a certain level of compliance. Both are summarized below:

WCAG Design Principles:

• Perceivable: All relevant information in your content must be presented in ways the user can perceive.
• Operable: Users must be able to operate interface components and navigation successfully.
• Understandable: Users must be able to understand both the information in your content and how to operate the user interface.
• Robust: Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted by users, including those using assistive technologies (such as screen readers).

WCAG Compliance Levels for Online Video:

• Level A: Captions are provided for all prerecorded audio content in synchronized media, except when the media is a media alternative for text and is clearly labeled as such.
• Level AA: In addition to Level A compliance, captions are provided for all live audio content in synchronized media.
• Level AAA: In addition to Levels A and AA compliance, sign language interpretation is provided for all prerecorded audio content in synchronized media.

To learn more about WCAG 2.0 guidelines visit W3C.org.

Q: What captioning quality is required for ADA, Section 508 compliance?

Section 508 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act (enacted in 1973) is an amendment that broadens the original act’s application to include online video content. While this act generally only applies to federal agencies, many states have passed laws that also make Section 508 applicable to federally funded organizations, such as colleges, research facilities, and arts institutions.

Quality standards for television captioning set the precedent for online video captioning that aims to improve accessibility. The quality standards for captioning online video include the following:

• Accuracy: Captions must be 99% accurate when relaying the speaker’s exact words, including correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar, with no paraphrasing.
• Synchronized: Captions must be time synchronized so they align with the words spoken in the video, and must remain visible long enough for the viewer to read (3 to 7 seconds per caption frame).
• Completeness: Videos must include captions from beginning to end.
• Styling and Placement: Font and size should be easy to read and the placement on the screen should no block important content.

Q: Does Panopto support best practices and Section 508 compliance for video captioning?

Yes. Panopto includes features that support the production of Section 508-compliant video captions, including the ability to add human-generated captions from any of our captioning partners right within the online editor, as well as the option to upload human-generated captions acquired from both external captioning services and ASR captions that were edited in-house.

Panopto includes support for other accessibility features too, including screen reader support and keyboard navigation.

Q: Can you change the style and position of captions in Panopto?

Yes. In addition to making it easier for video creators to add captions that meet the quality standards for compliance under Section 508 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act, Panopto’s video player enables viewers to change the styling and placement of captioning to suit their individual needs. You can learn more about our configurable caption styling on our support site.

Q: How does pricing for captioning work?

For video platforms that support machine-generated captions, that feature is generally included at no additional cost.

Pricing for human-generated, Section 508-compliant captions varies quite a bit depending on the scale (there are often discounts for high-volume contracts) and turn-around time (24 hours, 2 days, 5 days, etc.)

Q: Are unlimited captioning services truly unlimited?

Unlimited machine-generated captioning is generally provided by video platforms that support ASR.

However, you should beware of video platforms that claim to provide unlimited Section 508-compliant, human-generated captioning. There is always a cost to human-generated captioning services, so if you’re offered free or unlimited human-generated captioning:

1. Ask to see the actual captioning costs that are being baked into your contract elsewhere. Some video platforms claim to support unlimited human-generated captioning, but in fact simply offset the captioning costs by increasing the price you pay for video hosting, storage, or streaming.
2. Be sure to ask about usage caps. Some video platforms that claim to offer unlimited human-generated captioning restrict this captioning to videos shorter than 30 minutes. For universities recording hour-long lectures or businesses capturing 45-minute employee town hall events, this approach is infeasible.

Still have questions about captioning that we didn’t address here? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us here so we can answer your captioning questions.

The post Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About Video Captioning, Answered appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

As organizations grow and mature, often one of the greatest challenges they face isn’t competition — it’s simple communication. This problem has only grown larger as remote offices increasingly dot the globe and sales take place online 24/7/365.

Too many organizations rely on text-heavy documents, recaps, summaries, and emails to share ideas and keep each other up to date. Not only does all that take a great deal of time and effort to create, as many managers can attest, but it’s also seldom read.

A better option? Use on-demand video for corporate communications.

Video can help you and your team quickly capture ideas, share best practices, and even supplement emails — just click record and go.

4 Ways To Use Video For Corporate Communications

1. Break Down Barriers To Social Learning With Video

Informal “ask-the-expert” conversations — often referred to as social learning — are the most effective ways for employees to learn from one another, transfer institutional knowledge, and build your competitive advantage. There’s only one problem with social learning at most organizations today: it doesn’t work unless your expert is there to answer the questions — unless of course, you record it.

With searchable social learning video, every member of your team can quickly record and share ideas, demos, reviews, recaps, and more, right from their laptops, tablets or smartphones. Team members can take advantage of each other’s insider expertise, picking up valuable pointers and learning new tactics anytime, anywhere—even when separated by thousands of miles or well after your subject matter expert has moved on to a new role.

2. Engage Employees With Videos For Internal Communication

Every year employees ask for more insight into the inner workings of their organizations. But email newsletters just aren’t getting the job done. According to Forrester Research, employees are 75 percent more likely to watch a video than to read documents, emails or web articles.

Ask your executives and internal communications teams to record video messages that the sales team can view on demand, or webcast live. Video can help make these news announcements more engaging and shareable — and much easier for your busy sales team to take in.

3. Share Team Meetings and Record Presentations

With your sales team spread across the country or around the globe, face-to-face meetings are often an impossibility. And that’s a real problem because most organizations still rely on meetings for updates, decisions, brainstorms, and more.

When face-to-face communications aren’t possible—and sometimes even when they are—recording meetings can be an invaluable practice. Add more life to your next WebEx or Skype call by recording it and storing the video in your organization’s video library so it can be searched and reviewed by remote team members.

Modern video platforms can help you record multiple video streams to capture more than one presenter, as well as presentation slides, whiteboard notes, computer screens, and almost anything else — so your team is always in the loop. Video presentations that show multiple media streams make it much easier for workers to learn compared to PowerPoint slides with a voiceover.

4. Replace Email With Short, Personal Videos

Too often businesses rely on email or instant messages to share detailed messages. Document reviews, status updates, meeting summaries—while easily shared in a three-minute video or face-to-face chat — often take forty-five minutes and six paragraphs to transfer to the written form.

When distance or timing make remote communication preferable to face-to-face conversations, video provides a stand-in that’s often faster and more engaging, with dramatically reduced potential for misunderstanding due to missed nonverbal cues.

Today’s modern video platforms make it easy to record a quick video and share it by email with one or many recipients. For sales teams in many organizations, it’s now faster to share a message by simply clicking “record” and speaking into a webcam. Better still, adding the human element of video typically makes the message even easier for the viewer to comprehend.

Forward-looking organizations are already making video a part of almost every aspect of training and communications.

Find out more about Panopto’s industry-leading video platform 
See how Panopto can help your organization share knowledge, ideas, and expertise more effectively. Contact our team for a free trial of Panopto today.

The post How To Share Knowledge More Effectively At Work appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Technology is changing the face of education. Today’s students live in a world where information can be accessed 24/7 through mobile phones, tablets, and laptops — and according to a 2010 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, young people aged 8-18 spend an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes per day consuming media, and through multitasking are able to pack 10 hours and 45 minutes of media content into that time — 7 days per week. At the same time, students have increasingly come to expect the ability to consume content on their own terms, when and where they want it. As a result, engaging with students today means incorporating the technologies that have become ubiquitous in their lives into the learning experience.

Welcoming these technologies into the classroom isn’t just about breaking through the noise. There is a growing amount of evidence indicating that the use of technology-enhanced instruction, or digital learning, can improve student achievement. From blended learning environments to classroom software apps, to online skills assessment and more, digital learning is enabling students to retain more knowledge, engage more in the classroom, and increase performance.

Beyond the classroom, digital learning can have an impact on what is known as deeper learning — skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, effective communication, collaborative working, and self-directed learning that enable people to take the knowledge gained from one situation and apply it to new situations. These skills are becoming increasingly important in a rapidly evolving, globalized work environment that demands flexible intelligence and an ability to adapt to change.

But what are some of the digitally-enhanced experiences that provide opportunities for deeper learning? Tom Vander Ark and Carri Schneider of GettingSmart.com have created an enlightening infographic detailing 15 deeper learning scenarios that can help students prepare for roles in a 221st-century workplace.

Video Supports the Student-Centric Approach to Deeper Learning

Creating opportunities for deeper learning requires a student-centric approach to teaching that is structured around the needs of individual students. Shifting to a more personalized learning experience motivates the student to become more engaged and actively participate in their own education, which in turn fosters critical thinking and other deeper learning skills.

However, providing a customized learning experience for each student can only reasonably be done at scale through the use of technology. For many educators, the first step in providing personalized learning at scale is through the use of a video platform. Video technology enables a student-centric learning environment in the following ways:

• Flipping the classroom. Under the flipped classroom model, teachers record lectures for students to watch before class, freeing up in-class time for teacher-supervised activities. A video platform’s ability to quickly record micro-lectures and tutorials ensures teachers can easily provide students with additional information based on discussions during class.
• Data driven instruction. Video engagement analytics provide insight into student viewing behavior that can guide content customization. Information such as trends in viewer dropoff and repeated viewings can alert instructors to concepts that their students are struggling with.
• Personalized skills assessment. Often, the allotted class time isn’t sufficient for professors to evaluate presentations and demonstrations from each individual student. A video learning platform enables students to record role-play scenarios, simulations, and presentations for the instructor to evaluate and provide individual feedback, leaving more class time for discussion and activities.

Bring Video Into Your Classroom With Panopto
If you’re interested in learning more about how easy it can be to use video to personalize the learning experience for your students, contact our team to request a free 30-day trial of Panopto’s industry-leading video learning software.

The post Infographic: How Digital Learning Contributes to Deeper Learning appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.

Eighty-five percent.

That’s the amount of every dollar invested in corporate classroom training that’s spent just on getting people into a room. Instructor time, travel costs, meal expenses — it all adds up quickly against your budget, even before the first fact can be shared.

What does that mean in real dollars? Well, the specifics will vary for every organization, location, and event, but for a high-level view of how fast those expenses can spiral, just take a look at our latest ROI calculator example.

That’s more than six thousand dollars in travel, lodging, and food for a relatively small 1-day in-class training session. For smaller business, just a few training sessions could take a big chunk out of your L&D budget. For larger organizations — where on-site training sessions of one type or another are often available weekly or even daily — it’s easy to see how this line item alone could become a six- or seven-figure drain on your L&D or human resources budgets.

Today, organizations are starting to take notice. Many of the world’s most successful businesses have begun seeking new ways to share and scale training information — without the budgetary burden of on-location classrooms.

• After finding that up to 40% of its own classroom training costs were spent on travel and lodging, IBM moved half of its training programs to an eLearning format, saving $579 million in just 2 years.
• Oracle has credited using on-demand video rather than in-person events for saving the company more than $10 million.
• Microsoft used video to cut classroom training costs by $303 per person, from $320 to just $17.
• And Caterpillar found that e-learning generated a cost reduction of anywhere from between 40 and 80 percent over in-class training, depending on the size of its audience.

How much could you save
with video-based e-learning?
Calculate Your Savings

How Video Can Help Scale Corporate Training — Without Breaking The Budget

On-demand video enables Learning & Development teams to share training information anytime, anywhere — whenever an employee needs it.

Video enables trainers to create an e-learning environment that mirrors the classroom — bringing information and explanations to life in an engaging, visual way not possible with static text handbooks.

Best of all, video training can be saved, stored, searched, and shared. That means employees can access it from anywhere — no classroom required. And unlike in-class sessions, video makes it easy to rewind and repeat important concepts, and to search and fast-forward instantly to relevant topics.

For trainers, meanwhile, video opens a world of opportunity to go further. Without the time required for travel and classroom logistics — not to mention repeating the same class content at different office locations — human resources and development teams can instead focus on sharing more content, going deeper with existing content, and finding new ways to cultivate organizational expertise and productivity.

Learn more about how video solves today’s most common training challenges.

For 14 new ideas for supporting and scaling formal and informal learning with video, download our free white paper, Your Anytime Anywhere Corporate Classroom, today.

Video training is no longer a novel idea. It’s the new normal. Make sure your organization isn’t missing out.

The post Is In-Class Training Killing Your Learning & Development Budget? appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.