Yale Center for Teaching and Learning

Media Library

Panopto, a cloud based media management platform, looks to address media management requirements for Yale’s instructional settings and entire campus community. The Center for Teaching and Learning led this effort in Spring 2016 in response to important teaching and learning opportunity that has arisen as the impact of video becomes an increasingly-important pedagogical tool.

Media library Useful Links:

Media Library How-to Guide
In Canvas
Lecture capture through Webcasting

Why a media management platform?

In 2014, Yale’s Technology Architecture Committee commissioned a report analyzing the current landscape of video-related services at Yale.  Of these findings, challenges were uncovered in the areas of video distribution and hosting including:

  • No central repository of sharing media materials for teaching and learning.
  • Use of multiple and disconnected public platforms (Vimeo, YouTube, iTunes U).
  • Lack of cross-course sharing of instructional assets for communal access and appropriate reuse.
  • No access to video libraries for other web-based platforms used for teaching (ex. Course-press, Drupal). 

Along with findings of the 2014 working group, the Center for Teaching and Learning has collected feedback from instructors and departments across the campus about methods to easily create, post, share, catalogue and reuse content in their courses. As video becomes more a more impactful  pedagogical tool, both for online and on-campus learning, it became imperative for Yale to consider a unified media platform to address these issues.

Why Panopto?

To address the opportunity described above, a search began for a unified platform that would create media tools for everyone: faculty, students, departments and centers, all following a high quality, ease-of-use approach helping to enhance residential teaching and drive online learning.

Eight platforms were reviewed by an ad-hoc group consisting of CTL, ITS, and various professional school representatives. In the end, Panopto was found to align closest to our requirements, with the strongest showing in the three areas of highest priority: ease of use, video creation and curation, and accessibility.

This pilot was intended to verify the features and requirements of the Panopto platform, and involved representatives from across campus. Many cases were tested on this platform and while any one working group member might have only tested a subset of features, our intention was to represent, collectively, testing for the overall platform. Click here to view the Pilot Working Group’s Final Report.

What about lecture capture?

Lecture capture is a means for automatic video recording and publishing of lectures to Canvas or other systems. Panopto has extensive capabilities as a lecture capture platform including classroom capture, desktop capture, webcasting, and remote scheduling. Traditionally, lecture capture systems have been separate from a video management system, but since Panopto serves both functions, uses will be able to curate and create content in the same tool.