What is Lecture Capture, and what is Panopto?

Lecture Capture systems record the screen of your computer, and optionally, video of the presenter or perhaps a whiteboard, document camera, or lab experiment. The resulting recording is available to students via Canvas, a web page, email, or other means of distribution.

Lecture capture is most commonly used as the name implies: to record a lecture presented in a classroom for future reference by the students. It can also be used to record short lectures for online classes, record a short demonstration that has to be repeated regularly, record student speeches, or remotely proctor an exam.

Panopto is the lecture capture system currently in use at Highline and most other colleges in the state of Washington. The system is usually used in connection with Canvas, but can be linked from other web sites and tools.

Why capture lectures?

Using lecture capture has several benefits:

Students can review lecture materials until they are able to understand difficult concepts
English language learners can hear the material again, stop, pause, check translations, and review
Students who are out sick or dealing with job or family issues can catch up on class materials.

Won't students ditch?

The latter point may be cause for a concern that students will simply stop showing up. Students will still come to class (Nordmann et al, 2018).

Nordmann, E., Calder, C., Bishop, P., Irwin, A., & Comber, D. (2018, October 9). Turn up, tune in, don’t drop out: The relationship between lecture attendance, use of lecture recordings, and achievement at different levels of study. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0320-8

Will it benefit my students?

"There was an interesting (and quite complex) finding regarding student GPA, attendance, and recording use: It turned out that students with a low GPA benefitted from an increased use of recordings if they had attended many of the lectures as well. However, students with a high GPA only benefitted from an increased use of the recordings if they had attended few lectures. In other words, high achieving students can successfully use lecture recordings to make up for missed lectures, but low achieving students only benefit from using recordings if they use it as supplement to the lecture that they had attended" (Nordmann et al, 2018).

Will my students use it?

If you are using lecture capture, keep in mind that many students don't have a clear understanding of how to be a successful college student (Conley, 2007), and may not know how to effectively use recorded lectures to learn, and from above, the importance of attending class. When using lecture capture, we recommend the following:

Include information about appropriate ways to use the recordings in your syllabus;
Spend time in the first week of classes discussing the importance of not using the recordings as a cut strategy. Highlight the things students will miss by not being in class.
Discuss effective ways to use recordings. For instance, demonstrate how to skip ahead or search within a recording and how to take notes while watching.

References

Conley, D. T. (2007). Redefining college readiness, Volume 3. Eugene, OR: Educational Policy Improvement Center.