What is Panopto Remote?
Once upon a time a faculty member wanted to record their class lectures during a spring semester so they could reuse them for a summer course that they needed to teach from another location. A student of the professor wrote a lecture capture program. Today that student is the CEO of Panopto.
Panopto Remote is lecture capture in a classroom that is designed to be invisible to the faculty member, for the purpose of recording the lecture for students. A faculty member may choose to do this for accessibility reasons, so a sick student can attend the class remotely, or so every student has a recording of the class to refer back to. The recording is transcribed using automatic speech recognition, can be edited by the faculty member, and shows up in Canvas after the class is over. It can capture the laptop screen of the faculty member, the slides they are presenting, along with audio and video of the instructor, and even more. It can be scheduled ahead of time for an entire semester, all the faculty member has to do is come into the classroom and plug in their computer, and give their lecture.
Panopto Remote is NOT Zoom, it is not two-way interactive web conferencing. It is designed to augment a physical classroom session where the faculty member concentrates on the students in the classroom, not the remote audience. Remote participants can use a discussion board to interact with students in the classroom if the faculty member desires, but lecture capture strives to be invisible to faculty, and not increase their teaching workload by having to juggle in-person and remote students, which can quickly become unwieldy with a large class. It can also be used to record a class lecture for re-use by the faculty member, just like Panopto can be used to pre-record a lecture for a flipped classroom approach.
Panopto Remote can be run on dedicated hardware appliances in integrated teaching auditoriums, or can be run on a regular PC in a smaller room or conference room. Two computers can be used in tandem to capture multiple inputs, and it can be used on a Mac computer running Windows.
The College of Pharmacy at UT has been using Seneca Scribe capture appliances running Panopto Remote to replace their MediaSite lecture capture appliances. This module will document a low-cost approach using PC's headed to UT Surplus, along with a few additional pieces of hardware. We hope to show several different configurations possible using this approach to hopefully enable CSU's across UT to take advantage of yet another feature of Panopto to help their faculty and students.
One of the most confusing things about Panopto Remote is understanding what it can do. When you look at a regular Panopto recording, there are some elements of the user interface that the viewer can modify, like which video they want to watch in the larger screen. When Panopto Remote is configured to capture multiple inputs, the user interface changes to reflect the additional inputs that are available to the viewer. However, you can't see these until you create the recording. The following demonstrations are primarily for faculty to see to understand what is possible with Panopto Remote.
Because it is essentially a live camera and microphone in a classroom, Panopto Remote can only be accessed by 1) the faculty member in the classroom can turn it on, off, or pause it in some cases and 2) an educational technology staff member at UT who has been trained to setup and schedule lecture capture sessions. These staff members must also verify that the recording is returned to the Canvas section for the course in the manner the faculty member desires. Faculty can either edit the recording before it is published, or just let it publish automatically to Canvas. Viewing of the recording is only available to enrolled students in the class.
If you want to experiment with or use Panopto Remote in your CSU (College, School, or Unit), please contact Alexis Mendez at ITS, who can get you the registration number and access you will need.