Panopto recordings have been heavily used by students even before the move to partly online delivery. This year they rely on pre-recorded content even more. Facilitating active learning using asynchronous materials such as lecture recordings can be challenging. We have previously shared with you the guide on using lecture recordings for students outlining six key strategies helping them to make most of the recordings. In one of our previous posts we have also explored the use of Panopto captions and quizzes which enables your recordings to be more accessible and interactive. Today we would like to introduce you to two additional Panopto functionalities – discussion and notes.

Notes

Making notes have been recognised as one of the key strategies in enabling students to learn more effectively with lecture recordings. Doing it in Panopto is a convenient way to do so. Panopto gives users the ability to take notes on the video on the same page when as the recording player. The notes will appear time-stamped right along with the part of the video that corresponds with it. Additionally, you can search within any note you take and download them. This function is also available when the session is being delivered live.

By default, notes under your username will be private, but you can set them to public and create ‘channels’ which enable you to take notes within a specific group. To learn more about notes, visit How to Take Notes. 

Discussion

The Discussion function enables students to post questions and comments visible to other students and the lecturer. Similarly to Notes, students’ posts in Discussion will have time-stamps enabling others to see the exact part of the lecture the posts refer to. Others can then reply to the posts and the recording creator can delete, edit and download the Discussion.

This is an excellent tool to give students an opportunity to ask questions while watching the lecture as they would do when attending the lectures face-to-face. You could encourage them to use the Discussion function to post their questions and comments and address them in an online synchronous session. For more information, visit How to Use Discussion in Videos.