Educational Enhancement

Panopto and the flipped classroom

Posted on 7th January 2020 by Paolo Oprandi

Flipped learning allows students to repeat watch lectures, repeat exercises as needed and generally learn at their own pace. As such it is an inclusive approach to teaching, which accommodates different study habits and abilities. It allows the tutor to use classroom teaching time as a space for students to practice the knowledge they have learned, and ask questions to the lecturer that they may have. This is the idea of a flipped classroom and those engaging in it are asking, “how is the student experience and depth of student learning affected when flip our classrooms?”

The flipped classroom

The flipped classroom is a teaching method being used more in higher education. It uses pre-class activities to introduce students to materials you would otherwise introduce them to in lectures and uses the face-to-face teaching time to engage them in higher order activities.

If you wish to change your teaching practice to devote more face-to-face teaching time for any of the following activities you should consider taking a flipped learning approach:

Student discussion and exploration of the subject.
Group work, which encourages students to learn from one another
Practical work, where it is helpful to have a video demonstration to rewind and rewatch. In this model, students watch demonstrations of practicals before class.
Role-play activities to show competency.
Student presentations and peer-led teaching.

Flipping with Panopto

Panopto, our new lecture capture and video management system is an ideal technology to support the flipping of your classroom if you choose to recreate the lecture experience at home by creating a series of videos. Videos are ideal for flipping in part, because they can be more inclusive than alternative methods of content delivery and in part, because video fulfills students expectations that they will be listening to a lecture. Usually the tutor will also expect the students to answer questions at home so that students can test their understanding. If the quiz is online it can also give the tutor a feel for the level of student understanding and the particular areas that they are struggling with before the face-to-face teaching session.

Panopto is closely integrated with our online study platform, Canvas. It is set up in many teaching spaces around campus. The captured streams are processed into a video for the web, editable by the tutor and accessible by students from within Canvas.

However, Panopto video is not only capturable in teaching rooms. The Panoto software is downloadable by any member of staff (or student) of the University and tutors can make video content from whatever device they choose and put it into Panopto. This is what makes it such an ideal tool to allow you to flip your lectures. It can be used to produce short video clips of content or reproduce a lecture that is delivered from your desk and you can embed non-video content including websites and questions that the students need to answer in order to access the rest of the video.

screenshot of a Panopto recording with an embedded quiz — A Panopto recording with an embedded quiz.

If you are intending to flip your classroom with the aid of Panopto we suggest you cut up your lecture into five to ten minute videos and use the quiz tool to test you students knowledge at the end of each clip. We suggest that you look at the students responses to the quiz questions before the session so you can get an idea of their level of understanding and where they are struggling.

Case Study

In International Development, Dr Anna Laing and Dr Benjamin Hunter have flipped their classroom for a module in Research Methods. They have produced interactive video lectures, which students are expected to do in their own time. The videos give an introductory ‘how to’ lecture on each of the research methods that they teach on the module – quantitative methods, qualitative methods, and participatory approaches. These are short roughly twenty minute videos that are broken up by quizzes on the lecture material to check the students’ understanding of the material. The students must watch the videos before they attend class. Dr Laing and Dr Hunter chose to flip their classroom so they could utilize the classroom time to practice the research skills that they had learnt.

By week seven, roughly 90% of the cohort had watched the lectures and many had watched them multiple times, with some students commenting that it is helpful to re-watch the videos at their own pace in order to ensure their own understanding. Many students were positive about the flipped experience stating that they ‘do the essential learning individually outside of class, and then bring it together in group workshops’. They felt it did increase the workload and felt pressure to watch the lecture and do the reading, however they cited a number of advantages including that they can pause the video lecture to make notes and they can choose a time when is convenient to watch them. They preferred the pre-recorded videos to the lectures recorded in lecture theatres stating that the sound quality is better and there were fewer interruptions. Dr Hunter says, ‘it seemed to be particularly useful for students whose first language is not English – we have 21 direct entry students on the module, as well as eight visiting and exchange students’.

From Dr Laing and Dr Hunter’s point of view, the flipped classroom is useful for modules with a practical or skills-based focus as it makes the most of the time spent in the classroom to practice the skills taught, but they were keen to stress that this approach might be unsuitable for theoretical modules where the face-to-face interactive lecture has particular value given the opportunities for questions and discussion that are more difficult with online lectures. Many of the students also said that they did not think the flipped classroom teaching method would fit all their modules.

Benefits and challenges of flipping with Panopto

The benefits of flipping with Panopto are that it is easy to create videos with embedded questions for your students to watch in their own time and it is easy to get feedback on their understanding before you meet them in your face-to-face teaching session.

However, there are potentially some obstacles to taking a flipped learning approach. Your change in practice may require you to:

Be innovative and explore approaches to teaching, learning and assessment that you have not experienced yourself and are not common in your discipline.
Put in more preparation time in producing the video content and the homework quiz questions.
Trust that your students will come prepared.
Be ready to meet resistance from students who do not appreciate the new study pattern.

For more on quizzes in Panopto see Focus on Panopto: Quizzes and Discussions and if you would like help flipping your teaching with Panopto please contact tel@sussex.ac.uk.

TEL:US Podcast Christmas and 2010s decade special

Posted on 17th December 2019 by Daniel Axson

In the final episode of the decade, I caught up with Ant Groves during Digital Discovery Week. I also sat down with some of our team to talk over our highlights of the academic year so far, and of the decade.

Merry Christmas to all our listeners, we hope you have a wonderful festive season.

Thanks for listening.

Transcript coming soon.

Tagged with: 2010s, 5G, 6G, AI, apple, christmas, future, iPad, Technology, Technology Enhanced Learning, Twitter
Posted in Podcast, Uncategorized

Focus on Panopto: Editing recordings

Posted on 13th December 2019 by Anne Hole

Panopto allows creators to edit their recordings. This post looks at the most common editing tasks you are likely to want to do.

Trimming

Sometimes you might want to tidy up the beginning or end of a lecture recording. For example, you may have started the recording but there is a delay as people arrive. It is easy and quick to trim a recording in Panopto.

Find your recording and hover over it to click on Edit.

screenshot of edit button on a recording

On the timeline under the video, drag the black line to shade out the portion you want to cut. You can trim the beginning, the end, or a section at any point in the recording.

screenshot of the streams and editing line

When you have made your edits click the Apply button at the top.

The recording will then be re-processed with your edits, so will be temporarily unavailable to view.

One of the great features of Panopto is that editing is non-destructive – your cuts are hidden from viewers but you can go back and change them, or even use the Revert button to return your recording to its original state.

This guide from Panopto has a video showing How to Trim a Video in the Editor and detailed step-by-step instructions.

Oops! I forgot to resume after pausing!

Being able to pause a recording is useful, for example when there is a break in the lecture or student activities happening. The keyboard shortcut F9 will pause or resume recording. But once a recording is paused it is easy to forget to resume recording – fortunately that is easily fixed in Panopto.

As with trimming a recording, you can use the Edit tools to take out a paused section. The pause will show as greyed out on the timeline and you can drag the edit line to reduce the length of the pause.

Renaming

When starting a recording at the beginning of a lecture you may not want to spend time giving it a nice title. By default your recording will be identified by the date and time of the recording, but you can change that later.

You can do this when you are making edits, by clicking on the name of the recording at the top of the screen and typing in your changes, then Enter or Return on your keyboard.

Alternatively, if you only want to edit the title you can do that from Settings. You will see the name of the recording and an Edit button. This Panopto guide shows How to Change the Name of a Video in both ways.

Add Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) captions

One of the options in the editing screen is adding captions. Panopto creates captions automatically using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and these can be easily added to a recording.

Please note that the ASR captions will not be available immediately after a recording has processed. Videos up to 1 hour long should have captions ready in 8 hours, but captions for longer recordings will take up to a day.

ASR captions are not 100% accurate as their primary purpose is to support the search function, but they are probably equivalent to the auto-captioning you see on some news programmes. The ASR captions can be edited if required. This guide from Panopto shows the steps to Adding ASR captions.

Editing streams

When you start your recording you select the sources to be recorded. When the recording is processed, these sources appear as editable streams. The video and audio sources are combined into the Primary stream (P1), any secondary sources such as the main screen or additional cameras have a stream each (S1, S2) and if you have added PowerPoint that will be SL.

You can edit all the streams at once, one or more secondary streams independently, delete PowerPoint slides or add new material. The Panopto guide on How to Edit and Add Streams in the Editor will take you through how to do that.

If you have any queries about editing Panopto recordings or would like to discuss how you might use Panopto to enhance your students’ learning please contact tel@sussex.ac.uk.

Tagged with: Lecture Capture, Video
Posted in Panopto

Focus on Panopto: Sharing recordings

Posted on 6th December 2019 by Anne Hole

Panopto is primarily used to record lectures, in which case lecturers will usually make the recording directly into the folder for a particular module. When those recordings have finished processing they will be visible to students on that module. Sometimes, however, you may want to handle sharing of a recording in a different way. This post will explore the options.

Using ‘My Folder’

If a recording is not for a specific module, or you think you may want to edit it before it is visible to students, you can use the ‘My Folder’ instead of the module folder. Depending on how you are accessing Panopto you can choose ‘My Folder’ from:

the dropdown list at the top of your Panopto library in any Canvas module;
the main screen if you are using the Panopto app on your desktop or own computer;
the session settings when you start a recording.

You can create extra sub-folders in your My Folder if you want to. Recordings in your ‘My Folder’ will not be visible to students until you move them into a module folder (see below), so it is useful if you want to review and/or edit the recording before making it visible to students. You may also want to add extra material and/or activities to a recording before you share it. Other blog posts in this series look at adding YouTube videos, Discussions and Quizzes in Panopto. Or you may want to record a presentation to a research seminar that you can then share in a website, blog or by email. Panopto provide this guidance on How to Use ‘My Folder’.

One recording for two or more modules?

Sometimes a lecture relates to two different modules (for example where there are core and elective versions of a module). There are two ways that you can make a recording visible in more than one Canvas module or other locations.

Copy and Move

This is probably the easiest and cleanest way to do this. It involves making a copy of a recording and moving the copy into another module folder.

When a recording is shared in this way, students see it in the list of Panopto Recordings for their module and can easily search in the recording and change their view. As the copy is a separate recording you can edit is separately from the original recording – so if you wanted to share only part of the recording with the second module, or add extra content for them, you could do that. Having 2 (or more) separate copies of the recording also means that you can see the viewing statistics for each recording.

Copy your recording

From your list of recordings, find the one you want to copy and click on Settings.

Screenshot showing the Settings button on a Panopto recording.

Then from the Manage tab, look for the ‘Copy’ button. You can give your copy a new title at this point if you want to, but if not it will have the same title as the original with (copy) at the end.

Screenshot of the Manage and Copy settings.

A confirmation box will pop up and as soon as you click OK a copy of your recording will appear next to the original. You now need to move your copy to the other module.

Move the copy into another folder

Click on the Settings button of the copy. You can then rename your recording and choose a different folder to put it in. Please be sure to Save any changes here.

Screenshot of the Name and Folder settings.

Your copy will disappear from the original folder and appear in the new folder.

Embed

The other option is to embed a recording. This option would be useful for embedding a recording in a blog or website. You can also embed a recording in a Page in Canvas, but this gives students a reduced view and search options as well as restricting your editing options and merging viewing statistics.

Panopto has guides on how to Share Your Panopto Video on Any Webpage and How to Embed Panopto Videos in a Canvas Page. You will find the Panopto icon here in the Rich Content Editor under the ‘More external tools’ icon.

Screenshot of the 'More external tools' button in the Canvas Rich Content Editor.

More sharing options

You can also use a link to share a Panopto recording. Similar to sharing options in OneDrive you can share with:

Specific People
Anyone at the University of Sussex with the link
Anyone at the University of Sussex
Anyone with the link

When you click on the Share button for a recording you will see the link for the recording and the options to specify who can access it. This guide from Panopto shows you How to Share a Video.

What is the difference between sharing and setting availability?

When talking about sharing recordings in this post we have talked about them being ‘visible’ and avoided using the word ‘available’. That is because the availability of a recording is something rather different.

When a recording has finished processing and/or has been moved into a module folder or shared by a link or embedding it can usually be viewed by anyone who has access. The recording will remain visible unless it is removed or deleted. You may want to limit the visibility of a recording without moving or deleting it and you can do this by using the availability settings to specify dates and times when the recording is viewable.

This guide from Panopto shows How to Publish Videos Using the Availability Workflow.

If you have any queries about sharing your Panopto recordings or would like to discuss how you might use Panopto to enhance your students’ learning please contact tel@sussex.ac.uk.

Tagged with: Lecture Capture
Posted in Panopto

Problem Document Format: PDFs and Accessibility

Posted on 3rd December 2019 by Matthew Taylor

In the past PDF (Portable Document Format) was considered a great format for delivering documents online. By their nature the PDFs can be viewed and look the same on different devices. However, with the increase in viewing content on mobile devices and the welcome new focus on accessibility, PDFs have come to pose a substantial challenge. Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) like the University of Sussex’s Canvas online study platform, are filled with PDFs which were not created with accessibility in mind and which don’t meet legal standards for accessibility.

There are three key elements on which documents of all formats commonly fail to meet accessibility standards:

missing or irrelevant text descriptions for images,
lack of headings and lists for structure,
poor colour contrast.

There are other issues which we cover in our digital accessibility toolkit but for this post I’ll focus on these three.

These issues are not immediately apparent when looking at a PDF. Take the following two examples. The first is a PDF with text descriptions and headings. The second looks the same but is an image of the former document embedded in a PDF. A visually impaired viewer confronted with the second example would not be able to access the content at all.

Does it need to be in PDF format?

The first thing to consider is whether your material needs to be presented in this format. There may still be reasons for creating a PDF as the format is more ‘locked down’, which some may see as desirable. However, if you can provide information in a Canvas page it is likely to be more accessible on a larger number of devices and certainly easier to update and change.

Creating accessible PDFs

If you do want to use a PDF, next we’ll look at some ways to do this. One likely route for creating it is from a Word Document or PowerPoint.

Preparing your document

The accessibility of your final PDF will depend on the accessibility of your source document so it is important that before creating a PDF you add correct structure such as heading styles and lists, and make sure that images have alternative text (alt text) before converting to PDF. You can find guidance on adding structure, alt text and using appropriate colours in Microsoft Office documents in our Digital Accessibility Toolkit so I won’t cover that in more detail here.

Once you are happy you have made your source Word or PowerPoint accessible, select File > Check for Issues > Check Accessibility, to run the accessibility checker. This can help to guide you to be sure you haven’t missed anything.

Converting to PDF

Both Word and PowerPoint give you the option to save as PDF (Select File > Save as Adobe PDF). However, with Word don’t save straight away. Select Options and make sure that Convert Word Headings to Bookmarks is checked.

Correcting existing PDFs

Before starting on this topic it is important to remember that placing a PDF of a journal article or section of a book on your module site is likely to be a breach of copyright. Readings should be added to your online reading list. If you are unsure how to do this, please contact the library for further guidance. If you have an existing PDF that you created yourself you can correct it using Adobe Acrobat. This is available free to all University of Sussex staff.

Recognisable Text

In the example above the second PDF was rendered inaccessible because it was an image which had been converted to a PDF. You can easily check if text is recognisable in a PDF by trying to select it by clicking and dragging your cursor over the text. The words should be highlighted. If the text is not recognisable, Acrobat has a useful function.

Select Tools > Enhance Scans.
Then, from the menu at the top select Recognize Text > In This File
Finally select the blue Recognize Text button.

You should now be able to select the text in the document.

A screenshot showing the Enhance Scans tool being used to recognise text in a scanned image. — Recognising text in a scanned image.

Adding Alternative Text to images

Once your file is open in Acrobat, select Tools > Accessibility to view the accessibility options.

Selecting Set Alternate Text then OK highlights the first image in the document and gives you a box to add a text description. It’s worth noting you also have a checkbox to mark the image as decorative. If the image provides no purpose other than aesthetics, check that box and a text description is not required.

Select the forward arrow to move on to the next image and repeat until all images are done, then select Save & Close to finish.

Adding some structure

Next, select Reading Order from the accessibility options. This should number the sections of the document so you can see the order in which they would be read by a screen reader.

You may see now that what you had thought was a heading has been lumped in with other text.

PDF with content highlighted. Images have been identified and show with alternative text. A heading has been identified as a paragraph. — A PDF displaying the reading order of the document.

To identify a heading click and drag your cursor to draw a box around the heading text. The text should show a purple border.

Next, select the relevant heading level from the Reading order panel.The main heading for the document should be Heading 1. Headings need to be nested, so Heading 2 is used for sub-headings, then heading 3 for subsections under Heading 2.

It can get more complicated

I’ve tried to keep things simple here but many of you will have documents which are far more complicated than this with maths, tables and complicated reading orders. If you are unable to make your documents accessible please do consider what other ways you can make this information available to students, for example as Pages in Canvas. Do visit our Digital Accessibility Toolkit to get more information on making your materials accessible.

If you have any questions or require further guidance, please get in touch with tel@sussex.ac.uk.

Tagged with: #a11y, Accessibility, PDF
Posted in Accessibility, digital skills

Focus on Panopto: Notes and Bookmarks

Posted on 29th November 2019 by Anne Hole

Recorded lectures are a useful resource for students and Panopto offers some great tools to help make the most of them. In this post we will be looking at Notes and Bookmarks.

Notes

Making notes as you watch a Panopto recording via Canvas is easy and has several additional benefits over making notes on paper. This functionality is not currently available on the Panopto apps for Android and iOS, but can be used when students watch recordings from a browser.

Notes linked to the video. Notes which are typed into Panopto as you watch and listen to a video are time-stamped so that they are linked to that moment in the lecture. Later, you can click on a note to take you back to that part of the recording.
Search your notes. Panopto notes are searchable, so if you need to find that note about a particular concept you are revising it is easy to do. Just go to the Panopto Recordings folder in your module and use the search box at the top of the screen. If you go to the Panopto app (Android and iOS) you can even search across all your modules at once.
Download notes. You can also take a copy of your notes out of Panopto by downloading them as a text file. That can then be copied and pasted into another program such as OneNote or Word.
Share notes with peers. If students want to collaborate on notes with peers they can create a Channel which others can join to add and/or view notes.

This guide from Panopto shows how you can take notes then edit, delete, download and share them.

Bookmarks

Panopto bookmarks are a great way to create a list of the parts of recordings that you want to refer back to later. You can add a bookmark at any point in a recording you are watching via Canvas and search bookmarks across all the recordings you have access to. This functionality is not currently available on the Panopto apps for Android and iOS.

To add a bookmark when you are watching a recording, click the Bookmarks tab and type in a few words to remind yourself what this bookmark is. The bookmark will be time-stamped and linked to that moment in the recording.

Screenshot of the Bookmarks area in Panopto

To see and search all your bookmarks you can click the ‘See all your bookmarks’ link from within any recording. This guide from Panopto shows you how to Create and Access Bookmarks.

If you have any queries about sharing your Panopto recordings or would like to discuss how you might use Panopto to enhance your students’ learning please contact tel@sussex.ac.uk.

Tagged with: Lecture Capture, Lectures, Note taking
Posted in Panopto

Alternative formats made easy with SensusAccess

Posted on 26th November 2019 by David Walker

The University of Sussex prides itself on being an inclusive education community, indeed inclusion is one of the five core values of the University’s Strategic Framework. Building on wider institutional efforts in this important area Technology Enhanced Learning and the Library have come together to licence a new online service to aid digital accessibility – SensusAccess.

Available to all staff and students of the University, SensusAccess is a self-service tool that enables users to upload and convert digital files into a range of alternative formats. The solution is particularly helpful in providing a means to convert inaccessible documents such as image-based PDF files to a more accessible format.

The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 came in to effect on the 23rd of September 2019. The new regulations set out stringent accessibility standards that must be met by all Public Sector Bodies, including universities. Content on websites, mobile apps and hosted on online study platforms such as Canvas must comply with accessibility standards. Public bodies must publish accessibility statements detailing any known accessibility problems, provide access to alternative formats where necessary and detail how users may report accessibility issues. Developing awareness of accessible design and supporting accessible content creation is therefore crucial to both ensuring inclusivity and meeting legal obligations.

SensusAccess provides a means for individuals to convert digital content to a format that best suits their need, including ebooks (EPUB, EPUB3 and Mobi), audio (MP3/Daisy) and braille. Uploaded files are processed and the converted output is emailed directly to your inbox.

SensusAccess is available to all members of the University of Sussex community through Canvas and can be accessed from the Help menu.

screenshot of link to SensusAccess in Canvas Help

Students and staff can also access SensusAccess from the Library website.

screenshot of SensusAccess on Library website

Accessible design benefits everyone. In recognition of this, the promotion of digital accessibility and inclusive teaching practices has been, and will continue to be, a priority for Technology Enhanced Learning.

In academic year 2019/20 we will build on recent activities which have included a guest article by Dr Lara Montesinos Coleman from the School of Global Studies on the topic of ‘Effective pedagogy for students with Specific Learning Difficulties’; an invited seminar with guest expert Dr David Sloan from The Paciello Group, who provided invaluable guidance on how individual digital content creators can ensure their resources are optimally accessible; a blog post highlighting the Accessibility Checker functionality within Canvas; and a series of professional development workshops for academic staff on ‘Designing engaging and inclusive presentations’.

SensusAccess represents our next step on this journey and an important new tool in our effort to reduce accessibility barriers for everyone in the Sussex educational community.

References

The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (2018). Available at: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2018/852/contents/made

Government Digital Service (2019), Understanding new accessibility requirements for public sector bodies. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websites-and-apps

Tagged with: Accessibility, digital accessiblity, SensusAccess
Posted in Accessibility

Focus on Panopto: Quizzes and Discussions

Posted on 22nd November 2019 by George Robinson

Panopto brings some superb features for improving engagement with your students, two of those features are Quizzes and Discussions which will be the focus of this blog post.

Quizzes

Panopto allows you to create quizzes which can be set to appear to viewers at predetermined points in the recording. There are four types of questions you can add to quizzes:

True / False – questions with answers that are either true or false.
Multiple Choice – several answers present, but only one answer can be chosen as correct.
Multiple Select – several answers present with multiple correct answers.
Fill In The Blank – questions that require users to fill in answers to the question. The prompt will ask for the correct answer to be provided.

Quizzes allow you to gauge students’ understanding and comprehension of the materials they are viewing. Panopto allows you to view the results of quizzes, including which questions students got right or wrong and what percentage of students chose a particular answer, in this way quizzes can serve as a method of informal formative assessment.

Students can also review quizzes after they have taken them to see which questions they got right or wrong. This can allow students to gauge their own understanding of a topic and identify knowledge gaps. If you use the option to to add feedback comments on the answers students can be informed as to why their answer was right or wrong.

Quizzes can also increase student engagement with recordings. Breaking up long lectures with activities increases the chances that students will remain engaged and pay attention to the entirety of the recording.

For further guidance on quizzes please see the Panopto Quiz guidance page.

Discussions

Discussions are a feature within Panopto that allows students to engage with and discuss their opinions and thoughts on a Panopto recording which anyone else with access to the recording can view and respond to. Comments are time stamped so they are linked to a particular point in the recording.

Screenshot of a Discussion on a Panopto recording.

This can be helpful if students wish to ask others for help or to know what others thought regarding part of a recording. Teachers can also engage in this discussion by replying to comments. It’s possible for teachers to moderate discussions as well, with the option to delete any comments if necessary.

For further guidance on using discussions please see Panopto’s How to Use Discussions in Videos.

If you have any queries about Quizzes or Discussions in Panopto recordings or would like to discuss how you might use Panopto to enhance your students’ learning please contact tel@sussex.ac.uk.

Tagged with: discussion, interaction, Interactive teaching, Lecture Capture, Lectures, Quizzes
Posted in Panopto