Panopto is SSU's current solution for instructional video. Faculty can use Panopto to prerecord instructional videos, store and share existing videos with students, caption videos for accessibility, and receive video-format assignments from their students.

Best Practices

• The best way to embed a video in Canvas using Panopto is via Canvas' rich text editor. This ensures that, if you copy a course into a future term, students in the future term will also have access to the video.
  1. Create a new Canvas Page for your video.

  2. In the set of buttons across the top of the screen, you should see a green triangle: This is the Panopto button. Click it.

     

  3. A new window will pop up, letting you select a video from your Panopto collection. By default, it will choose the folder associated with the class that you're in. However, if you are using a video that you originaly recorded in YuJa, your video will actually be in a different folder named "CSV migrations." Select the dropdown menu to open up the list of folders available to you; choose either "Everything" or "CSV migrations"; and if necessary, search for the video by name in the search box.

     
  4. Select your video and click the blue "Insert" button at the bottom of your screen. Your video should be automatically embedded in your Canvas Page.
  5. If you have any issues doing that, drop by CTET! We're happy to help.
• Whenever possible, instructional videos should be 10 minutes in length or shorter and should have an activity at the end that applies the video's content. Research has shown that students' attention in a passive learning situation, such as watching a video, tends to drop off significantly after that time. Also, novices need time to process new information before they can remember it. By making your videos short and requiring students to apply their understanding of the content afterward, you are likely to increase the amount of your content that they remember over the long term. Additionally, if you make a mistake while recording a shorter video, you have less work to do to correct or replace it than you would for a longer video. So recording shorter videos saves you time and effort, too.
• Accurate captions are essential for students with hearing disabilities, but they also help many other students, including students with learning disabilities like ADHD, working students, and any student who doesn't have a quiet study space in which to listen to instructional content. Unfortunately, while Panopto has a very good auto-captioning function, computer-generated captions are still not accurate enough to meet California's standard for accessible captions. So if you plan to share a video with your students, take the time to review its captions afterward to correct word choice and punctuation. This doesn't just help you comply with the law; it creates a better learning opportunity for many of your students.
• Once or twice per year, take a few minutes to review your Panopto video collection to download copies of videos that you want to keep for long-term archival purposes and delete videos that you no longer need. Our Panopto storage capacity is large but not unlimited, and video that doesn't get viewed for an extended period of time will get archived and eventually deleted. By curating your video collection regularly, you will reduce the risk of losing important videos.

Resources

• CTET Panopto Video Storage and Archiving Policies (coming soon)
• Official Panopto Suppot Center
• Editing Panopto Video Captions

Get Support

If your question isn’t answered by the above resources, we encourage you to visit CTET either in person or via Zoom, submit a help request, or just email us. We are happy to do a 1-on-1 training or support session with you. You can find our current business hours and contact information, including our Zoom link, on our Contact Us page.

Student Support

CTET only supports faculty, not students. If your students report any issues to you, we would encourage you to look at the issue with them and, once you've documented it, report it to us. Then we can figure out the cause of the problem.

If your students need direct support, they can contact SSU's IT Help desk for technology support, Monday through Friday, 8AM to 5PM.