Accessibility Week Day 2 Recap: Proving Your University’s Unique Value (with Panopto)

Mike Rich, VP of Business Development at Panopto did an Accessibility Week presentation with Head of Customer Success Sara Ciskie at Rev. They talked about successful and optimal communication strategies for online classrooms, using transcriptions and captions.

Key Webinar Slides

Webinar Transcript

Sara Ciskie: (00:00)
All right. Hello everyone, and welcome to our second webinar as part of Rev’s accessibility week. My name is Sara Ciskie, I’m Head of Customer Success at Rev.com. For those who aren’t familiar with our platform, Rev is the leading provider for closed captions for content creators and educators worldwide, [inaudible 00:00:22] for ADA compliance and also to help facilitate student engagement. I’m joined today by Mike Rich, VP of business development at Panopto. Super excited to have you here. And our topic today is something that I know is top of mind for many educators, administrators, all over the country and worldwide, which is how do I differentiate my university in era when everything is online? So super excited to hear about how your tech stack would really help differentiate yourself amongst the crowd of all universities. So, Mike, I’m going to have you go forward one slide before we dive into the content.

Sara Ciskie: (00:59)
So just a few housekeeping measures. First thing, as this is a webinar, everyone is in view only mode. So don’t worry, we can’t see you or hear you. We do have a chat over to the side, so feel free to chat in. We unfortunately don’t have live captions available with this platform. However, we will be sending out a recording with close captions and the slides in a followup email over the next couple of days. And then last but not least, we will be doing a Q and A session at the end, so please post your questions over in the questions tab on the right hand side. It is just Mike and I doing this here, so we’re going to do our best to get to everyone, but we’re super excited to answer the questions that you guys have. And Mike, with that, I will turn it over to you.

Mike Rich: (01:45)
Wonderful. Well, thank you, Sara. And thank you to the team at Rev for giving us this opportunity to talk to all of you and thank you for joining. It’s been a amazing few months for so many different reasons, but in particular, it’s been incredible to have the number of very complex conversations we’ve had with all of our customers and prospective customers, talking to them about how to solve really important and complex problems getting ready for the fall. And now that some of the initial problems have been worked out, now, people are moving to another phase of, “Okay, well now how do we look different? How do we bring that experience that we normally would have on our campus to the virtual world?” And so we’ll talk today about some ideas for that and some feedback we’ve heard from customers, and we’ll talk as well about some of the fundamental challenges that we’re still facing here as we plan for the fall.

Mike Rich: (02:50)
So today we’ll talk just very briefly about Panopto, If you haven’t heard of us, I’ll tell you just a slide or two about our platform, how you can differentiate in a remote mobile learning setting, and we’ll talk about this new normal of communications in the educational construct and how do you facilitate different modes of communication to empower your professors and the instructors to really focus on what they’re trying to do, which is teach the students and not troubleshoot technology. We’ll talk about how to operationalize accessibility, how accessibility is a differentiator, and how it can positively impact the way that your school is able to communicate to students and others. And of course, we’ll go through examples along the way. And as, I think, Sara mentioned at the top here, if you have questions, enter them into the chat panel and if we don’t answer them during the presentation, then we’ll have some time at the end to cover things. So Panopto, if you haven’t heard of us, we are a platform for video education.

Mike Rich: (03:54)
We’ve been around since 2007, we were founded out of Carnegie Mellon out of an incubator in Carnegie Mellon. And the experience of video learning on Panopto is very different from what you might experience if you are simply teaching through a Zoom call or some other traditional unified communications platform, there’s a big difference when you level up to a video platform, whether that’s Panopto or a similar platform in this space. You can see here, you get a lot more richer information and interactivity with both the material that you’re trying to present, as well as the person who’s on camera, and of course the information and metadata that surrounds the course, whether it be bookmarks or notes or discussions that you’re having with your students. Panopto’s at the center point of all of these different workflows that exist in both the corporate world and in the educational world, whether you’re conducting training or education, whether you have a physical wired classroom or you’re doing this through unified communications, whether you’re trying to capture a screen or conduct a meeting or a student discussion group, all of those are video-based use cases that we don’t necessarily think of as video production all the time, but there’s great value in storing them in a centralized platform like Panopto that can then extend to lots of other platforms.

Mike Rich: (05:20)
And Panopto brings in things like captions from Rev and other features from other providers, and then it can output it to a variety of systems, whether it be your learning management system or some other way that you’re trying to expose the video and combine it with all of your other learning assets. I like to tell people it’s really easy to teach over Zoom if you just have one class, but if you’re a professor with dozens of courses that you’re managing a week, and if you’re a school managing tens of thousands of student enrollments, then managing that video, keeping it secure, and most importantly, routing it to the people at the right time with the right permissions is a very complex workflow, as many of you may have discovered, and that’s where a platform like ours tends to help. So let’s talk about what we’ve learned in spring 2020 so far, and how that’s influencing the fall of 2020.

Mike Rich: (06:17)
This article was published a couple months ago by Inside Higher Ed, where they basically mapped out every scenario they could think of, of how a school might engage in the fall. And what’s interesting is that schools have started to make announcements, and maybe your school has done so already, and maybe you have a plan and maybe you don’t and it’s still being formulated. We’re now starting to see on a daily basis schools and university systems starting to trickle out information about what they’re planning to do in the fall. But the important thing to understand about this list here is that almost all of these scenarios rely on some form of remote learning. It assumes that students will not be in the classroom full time. And the terrifying thing is that the ones that don’t, often involve a cancellation or a delay of school altogether. There’s really only one scenario out of the 15 that we would consider “normal” as we would have defined it in the fall of 2019.

Mike Rich: (07:18)
So the world has changed quite a bit, and we’re all grappling to adjust to that. But one of the common themes here is that regardless of how you approach the fall, chances are remote learning is a key part of that plan. One of the challenges that you have with that plan of converting to remote learning is that all subjects are important. You can’t give someone a degree for everything except their chemistry class. You’ve got to make sure that they take all of the required classes. And if you have to do that online, then there are some subjects that are harder to virtualize than others, particularly classes in the arts and classes that have a high degree of demonstrations, like in science, those things can be quite challenging. And even things like mathematics, where you’re doing a lot of white boarding and stuff like that can be very challenging.

Mike Rich: (08:16)
And so having a strategy that allows people to virtualize across different methods and different teaching styles is very important. And so we’ll talk a little bit about flexibility and ways to solve that problem. We all learned the hard way in March that unified communications is fantastic, but it’s only part of the solution. And so many of us have experienced the challenges firsthand of using a platform like Zoom or WebEx or Teams or all of the above. They all have phenomenal benefits. And it’s amazing that we’ve been able to stay this connected and in this environment, but they all have tremendous challenges as well. And a lot of us have experienced the phenomenon where you’ve got the background noises and the audio noises, and you have 30 different students on one session and they’re all talking over one another, it gets more and more difficult the younger the age they are trying to teach to corral everyone on Zoom. And so simply having everybody on Zoom technically is not the solution. There is also the nature of how do you differentiate when every university now it looks like a Zoom call. And the Zoom experience that we’re seeing is the same thing that you see on Saturday Night Live and on late night shows and everything else in between. So unified communications is a great help, but we can’t stop there. We have to actually expand beyond that.

Sara Ciskie: (09:51)
Yeah, I imagine there’s also the question of when you do a zoom call, you get an asset, you get a recording asset that then lives on your computer or lives on some cloud storage. How do you manage all of that? That’s a completely separate problem that just having a unified communication solution doesn’t address.

Mike Rich: (10:10)
Absolutely. And you hit on a good point. Again, if you have one course and you’re trying to teach in Zoom, sending an email out with a link to the recording is not a big deal. When you have tens of thousands of links floating around with different passwords to remember [inaudible 00:10:27] you have no security, you have no protection of your intellectual property that you’ve created, and certainly you have no ease of use amongst the students at the end of the day, who are really trying to learn. So consistency there is really important. And what we saw in the spring is that the schools that struggled, relied too heavily on UC and typically, unified communications, they relied on a playbook where they maybe did not have much in advance, they didn’t have a lot of remote learning technology in advance and unified communications was the only thing that they have readily available.

Mike Rich: (11:05)
So what we saw a lot of schools do is they immediately up their subscription counts, they gave everybody a link to create a Teams meeting, or a Zoom recording or whatever it might be. And we run into all these challenges that we just talked about on the previous slide. It’s very difficult to manage that, all of your teaching through one particular type of technology. But there were schools that were successful and they had a different approach that is important to think about when you’re trying to differentiate in this space. Really, they focused on enabling their professors with three technologies for communicating, three methods of communicating. This doesn’t mean that there were three different tools necessarily, but it means that the tools that they chose supported these three really important use cases. And those use cases are unified communications, which again, most schools already have a solution there, but these other two are equally important; being able to enable a live broadcast where a professor can simply teach and lecture and not have to worry about all of the commentary and things on the other side, live broadcast is an important part of the tool set, and asynchronous learning has become a vital part of the tool set because we’ve seen time and again that in this era that we’re in, it is very difficult for people to all be on the same schedule.

Mike Rich: (12:35)
The world of 9:00 to 5:00 has largely ceased to exist for many of us when we’re trying to juggle our own families and our own, maybe kids, children’s needs or elderly needs that we have to deal with. There are health issues that might prevent us from attending some of these courses on time and other logistical issues, certainly as you get into K-12, you have to think about internet connectivity and challenges like that, even technology availability is a big-

Mike Rich: (13:03)
And challenges like that, even technology availability is a big challenge when you’re thinking about accessibility and making your courses available to everybody. So having tools in place that allow a professor to service all three of these use cases is really important. So that at the end of the day, they can focus on teaching and allow the students to consume it in a way that is right for them.

Mike Rich: (13:27)
So let’s take a look at one school and how they did it. This is the University of Washington and they were in the spotlight very early on. They are obviously in Seattle, which is where I sit. I was in Seattle when the nursing home in Kirkland was all over the global news and everybody was very concerned about what was developing here in this city. And we saw that in early March well before a lot of schools virtualized, the UW was already moving towards a combination of using Zoom and Panopto to virtualize their operations.

Mike Rich: (14:04)
And it was amazing to me to see that on a Friday, they announced that they were going virtual and they went virtual on a Monday. Think about your school and whether or not you have that same experience where everything largely transitioned in a weekend. Most schools were not so fortunate to be able to transition that quickly. And that doesn’t mean they didn’t have challenges, certainly they did. But what was amazing is Inside Higher Ed wrote about how it was going and this is just a few weeks later at the height. This was the end of March when they wrote this article at the very height of all the uncertainty about coronavirus.

Mike Rich: (14:47)
And the University of Washington was running their school. They were working together, they were solving these problems and their teaching semester wasn’t without challenges, but it largely was unimpeded. And for any of you who are in K12 or who have children in K12, it probably won’t surprise their own experiences. I’ll share my own experiences I’ll share with K12 and how challenging it was. Weeks and weeks of uncertainty about how they were going to virtualize. And then even once they did, it was a far cry from the physical environments that we used to have. And so it is possible to make this transition, but it does require a lot of planning. So let’s pivot a bit and talk about accessibility and how that can be a differentiator. We talked a minute ago about the importance of a video platform, a video strategy, and enabling the technology that helps you differentiate. Accessibility is another key way to differentiate. We know that accessibility helps everyone. And for those of you who are joining this webinar, I’m sure it’s no surprise for you to hear me talk about this virtuous cycle.

Mike Rich: (16:04)
That when you add captions to videos, it doesn’t just help the people who are requesting them. It often helps all of the other students who are referencing the material through search, through faster comprehension of that material. That helps impact learning outcomes across the board and that then feeds a virtuous loop where they want to have more captions on everything. When you move stuff into a video platform like Panopto, everything is indexed automatically.

Mike Rich: (16:37)
So every word becomes searchable, but still machine-based ASR is only about 95% accurate. And you think, “Wow, 95%, that’s really, really good.” And it is for most conversations like the one we’re having right now. But if I’m teaching a chemistry class with lots of technical jargon in it. If I’m at a corporation and there’s a proprietary terminology I use or a product names that get referenced a lot, those are the things that the machine captions can’t do well enough yet.

Mike Rich: (17:10)
And it can be challenging if you imagine taking a chemistry class, but leaving out all the hard words in your transcript. Well, that’s not really meeting your accessibility needs. So that’s where you need human-based captioners who are available to listen and understand, and discern those languages and the nuances of that communication much more specifically. And so, adding captions to that video that are human-based is really important, but figuring out a way to scale it is a big challenge that we’ll talk about.

Sara Ciskie: (17:42)
I love this slide, not just because I work for a close captioning company, obviously, but also this is entirely true. And also we know that a lot of students prefer to watch things without the sound on, right? So for students, like you said earlier, really meeting them where they are and how they want to learn and how they want to observe information. I think it’s a really integral part.

Mike Rich: (18:05)
Yeah. You bring up a good point. Panopto actually has a function where you can decelerate the video and slow it down if you need to watch it more slowly, but you can also accelerate the video and watch it more quickly up to two times speed. And it’s like tuning into an episode of Alvin and the Chipmunks, but you can do it. And it’s remarkably popular with students. What I think a lot of schools don’t realize is that you can read an accurate transcript at three times speed versus watching the video at two times speed.

Mike Rich: (18:39)
And that doesn’t mean that you’ll read the entire thing and get the same learning experience. But think about the review process. Think about the night before the exam and how quickly you enable students to go back in, find the material that they need and access it. That is a differentiator that is not just limited to the students who are requesting captions. That’s a differentiator that every student will appreciate.

Mike Rich: (19:07)
So what do you think about when you’re trying to roll out accessibility at scale? Well, you have transcripts and captions, and you have to think about live scenarios and asynchronous scenarios. But really there are all sorts of different things that can start to make your head spin and we’ll try to demystify that here in a little bit, but you want to consider the turnaround time.

Mike Rich: (19:28)
If you’re doing human-based captions, then a human really needs to read it kind of human also needs to review it. That takes time. You want to think about the accuracy requirements. Is 95% machine capturing good enough or do you need to get beyond that? Obviously, cost is a major consideration. And then you also want to think about how does this work downstream? How do I actually integrate with other systems that I’m working about? How do I make sure it’s secure? And that privacy is protected along the way, and how do I make this scalable so that I can have hundreds of professors ordering captions in a way that doesn’t bankrupt my company or my institution?

Mike Rich: (20:06)
So there’s lots to think about there and using this slide as a checklist of have we considered one, two, three, four, five is really important. Because for instance, there might be places where turnaround time can be relaxed. It might not be as urgent and you save some on costs. And there might be other cases where you do need very urgent turnaround time. That’s going to increase the cost. So there are levers of flexibility that you can throttle here depending on your institution’s particular needs and your school style.

Mike Rich: (20:39)
So how do you actually implement that and operationalize this at scale? Well, there are very important things to consider about that. But really what you want to think about is having a tightly streamlined process. And this is where a video platform, whether it be Panopto or another platform becomes really important. In Panopto and other platforms like it, there are rules that you can set up and say, “Anything that goes into this folder automatically send it off to be captioned. I don’t even want to approve it.”

Mike Rich: (21:13)
And there are other places where you can say, “I want these to be approved by somebody before they go off for captioning.” And then the magic of a really good video platform is that’s all you have to do. And the captions come back, they’re immediately applied to the video and you don’t even have to think about it. The students just press play and the captions are magically there, whether it’s 12 hours later or 24 hours later, or even four days later in some cases depending on your budget and how you set up your caption provider.

Mike Rich: (21:42)
But ultimately in order for you to scale this thing successfully, you need to consider the platform and how to make it easy and how to scale it. You also need to think about the difference between students who must have captions for learning and students who would like to have captions for learning. Those are two very different groups. And again, you might take a different approach from students who are actually contacting the accessibility department and saying, “I have alternate learning requirement that I need these captions.”

Mike Rich: (22:15)
Those professors in those classes may need to be set up for immediate, fast human captioning. In other scenarios where you’re trying to address the scenario I talked about earlier of the chemistry student who’s studying for the exam. Well, the exam is not going to take place for a couple of weeks, so you can take your time and caption it over time.

Sara Ciskie: (22:35)
So I think it’s great that we’re talking about how things integrate. I know for learning and education in general, there are hundreds, if not thousands of different tools out there available. Do you think there is such a thing as tool overload and how do you avoid that?

Mike Rich: (22:52)
Absolutely. I think what I tell people is you need the right degree of flexibility. So if we think back to the earlier slides in March, there was too little flexibility. Everybody had a Zoom and/or Teams, and that was it. And that was too rigid and not enough. You can also over-correct and provide so many tools that instructors can’t even focus on the teaching because they’re trying to remember how to use all these tools.

Mike Rich: (23:21)
So finding the right degree of flexibility is important. And that’s why having a video platform that’s coupled to unified communications works really well because if you have a video platform and a good UC tool, you solve all three of those use cases with two tools. And then that video platform extends into your learning management system, which the teachers are already very familiar with. And so again, there is a lot less to think about.

Mike Rich: (23:49)
And when I say that these tools are integrated, what I mean by that is if you use Canvas for example, and you go into canvas and you’re offering a course. If you have the right video platform, there’s a Panopto button in that course, and you just click there’s bold, italic, underline in Panopto. And you click on the Panopto icon and you insert a video that’s been baked into that platform. So from an instructor’s point of view, they’re using another tool that gives them more flexibility, but they don’t even really think about it that way because it’s so tightly integrated with their workflow.

Mike Rich: (24:28)
So here’s some questions to think about when you’re looking at video platforms. Are you able to natively order things within the platform and what does that process look like? Hopefully, your provider that you’re considering will give you a trial site and you’re able to actually test out the process, hook it up to your account that readily you might be setting up and testing with and try it out. Upload an hour or two of video and see how it works through the system. You want to understand the options to automatically order captions.

Mike Rich: (24:59)
And you also want to understand the options to protect that automatic ordering from being abused. There are definitely cases we’ve heard of where that has been implemented too liberally. And then you have cost implications that you’re not thinking about. And then you want to think about the questions for your captioning provider as well. What price points do they offer? What flexibility do they offer in their service? And can you offer different levels of service to different individuals? And how do you manage the process of who can order captions and how do you troubleshoot things if things go wrong?

Mike Rich: (25:37)
And ultimately if you’re purchasing at a university level or even a school within a university, and you are the accessibility team lead, you want to think about the customer service you’re going to get. How does support tickets work? Who handles this versus that? And do the companies work directly together on a regular basis? And one of the great things about having the relationship we have with Rev is that if there is a problem …

Mike Rich: (26:03)
Having the relationship we have with Rev is that if there is a problem and inevitably problems do come up from time to time, we know each other, we work very well together. We have teams and escalation processes. We have support, our support teams are trained, and so that makes that process all the more easy than if you’re trying to solve again, this problem with that tool and this problem with that tool and they’re very isolated and disconnected.

Mike Rich: (26:28)
I’ll put in one last important thing. All of this can be for naught if you don’t remember the audio and this is a complex AV diagram, and for those of you who are in accessibility, this might make your head spin. Don’t worry about this diagram. This is what an IT professional or an AV professional would geek out on all day long about where the wires go and how they all connect. But the most important part of this diagram to talk to your AV professional about is what’s the audio strategy and how is that going to work and how does it work in an in-home construct versus a classroom construct.

Mike Rich: (27:06)
In the classroom, we have seen time and again that the most complex system can be filled by a professor who clips the microphone on upside down or doesn’t clip the microphone on at all. Thinking about that audio is important not only for the professor, but for the audience as well. So if you imagine a false scenario that is very likely to occur, where there are very few students in the classroom, and many students who are remote because of social distancing requirements, what you have is people who are asking questions in the room and you want to provide an equal experience to those who are remote.

Mike Rich: (27:52)
So the best way to do that is to make sure that either the audio is picked up clearly for the students or that the professor is trained to repeat the question, which we’ve all been on those frustrating panel sessions and webinars where you can’t hear what the audience is saying. So remember the audio, it is absolutely a fundamental part, not just for the caption experience, but for the overall learning experience.

Mike Rich: (28:20)
So that brings us to a good time to summarize, and also to address your questions. So if you have any questions that you haven’t asked that we haven’t covered yet, please submit them now and we’ll cover them in a second. But just to summarize in some of the themes we talked about, you have multiple strategies for unified communications, for virtualizing in the fall timeframe. Don’t just rely on unified communications. Make sure you are thinking about a live one to many broadcast scenario, and certainly make sure that you have an asynchronous scenario set up that is more sophisticated than here’s the Zoom link, here’s the MP4 file, whatever that may be. That is a very big risk for the fall if you’re not prepared for those asynchronous workflows.

Mike Rich: (29:06)
Think about the role of accessibility and how to up-level the awareness of the importance of accessibility to others within your organization. I can tell if you attended this webinar, that obviously that’s something that’s important to you, but oftentimes there are other folks in the environment who don’t understand the power of adding captions at massive scale. So helping other people understand that is something that both your video provider and your caption provider can help you with. Think about operating at scale.

Mike Rich: (29:39)
Most importantly, walk through the scenarios that we talked about, go through the checklist that we provided, the bullets in this deck that you’ll get after the fact, and make sure you’re thinking about the turnaround time, the ordering process, the price, the budget management, all of those things, so that ultimately we hope that you and your faculty will be very successful come fall. So with that, that wraps the presentation part, and we’ll be happy to take your questions.

Sara Ciskie: (30:10)
Awesome. Thank you so much first of all, Mike, for putting all of this together and sharing all this with us. So we had a couple of questions come in about Panopto specifically in terms of capabilities. So I’ll direct those to the Panopto expert of course.

Mike Rich: (30:25)
Sure.

Sara Ciskie: (30:26)
So first of all, does Panopto include a built-in editing capability for videos?

Mike Rich: (30:32)
A built-in editor?

Sara Ciskie: (30:34)
Yes.

Mike Rich: (30:35)
Yes, Panopto does include a built-in editor, and I’m glad you brought that up because that’s another area to think about with differentiation are the ease of use of these tools. Panopto not only has a built-in video editor, but it doesn’t require any software to be installed in order to use it. It works completely within a web browser. So you can literally click a button, and say I want to edit this video, you don’t have to install a plugin. You don’t have to download software. From an IT management perspective, it’s very easy to use, and it will handle 90% of use cases. It is not an editor for producing your commencement ceremony, right?

Mike Rich: (31:16)
But it is an editor that will handle the vast majority of I need to go in, I need to cut out the chatter before the class started. I need to cut out this, the recording ran long, and I need to cut out maybe a section or two where I stumbled while I was teaching or things like that.

Sara Ciskie: (31:34)
Awesome. Then another one in terms of interactive tools. So I’m presuming this is for student facing content. Are there interactive tools available for Panopto? So things like polling, breakout rooms, word clouds, things like that.

Mike Rich: (31:50)
Yeah. So there are different ways to handle those scenarios depending on whether you’re talking about live or asynchronous communication. What Panopto does really well is it plugs into webcasting tools like Zoom webinar or Cisco Webex webinar, whatever it may be, and you can actually cast that stream directly into Panopto and relay it to students live so they can view it that way. If you need a lot of very sophisticated live technology, then you can use a fully featured tool like that. If you simply want to record a video and add a poll in the middle of it or a quiz, then Panopto allows you to record a video and insert a quiz at any point in that video.

Mike Rich: (32:37)
We have just released an enhancement that allows other tools to build solutions around Panopto video player. So we’re talking to a lot of engagement platforms that have very sophisticated note-taking capabilities and they do advanced analytics and basically wrap a whole experience designed to drive engagement around the world of video. There are several of them who are actively working on integrations with us. So if you have specific use cases, definitely reach out to us and we’ll walk you through them.

Sara Ciskie: (33:10)
Awesome. Then we got a question around how you would recommend to include live card. I know the diagram that you showed that has Rev in the workflow, which is more of a post production workflow, right? It’s for videos after they’ve already been created, but for live videos, does Panopto have a kind of workflow for that?

Mike Rich: (33:30)
Yeah. Great question. So there are two things, two ways I’ll answer that question. If you were webcasting this afternoon, the best way to do it would be to use a Zoom or some other platform that has live captions built into it and you could do that today. Then for instance, if you’re using our Zoom integration, those captions would immediately pass over to Panopto after the fact. By this fall, we will have the ability to take, I think the technical term is CEA 608/708-compliant feed in with an RTMP stream. So maybe that might be too technical for a lot of you. But for those of you who understand what I’m saying, you can basically use any live caption provider who can relay a RTMP feed into Panopto at that point. So if you’re interested in that again, talk to us. That’s something we’re actively developing and hoping to have ready by fall.

Sara Ciskie: (34:27)
That’s awesome. Then talking about the larger kind of toolkit for university, do you recommend that a university have the same tools across the entire university? Is that difficult to achieve when there are so many different departments and stakeholders within a school? How does that all operate?

Mike Rich: (34:47)
Here’s what I’ll say. It is not uncommon for Panopto to start within one school, within the university. At the same time, what I will say is the number one conversation we have had in the last few months are how do we extend this across the campus? I think people understand the complexity of extending one system across the campus, but you also get a lot of benefits from having that. You have a lot more standardization. You’re able to teach people more effectively. You’re able to scale much more effectively, and a platform like a Panopto is designed exclusively to do those very, very complicated things. Within Panopto, for example, there are tools we call departmental administration where you can actually carve off the school of business and have it be its own separate environment from the school of medicine.

Mike Rich: (35:44)
But at the same time, you still have an overarching administrative capability across that. So what I would say, as you have these stakeholders, make that a requirement and talk to your video provider about how do you make sure that the school of business gets what they need and the school of medicine gets what they need and a good video provider will be able to answer that question for you. There are certainly also budget challenges. Sometimes there’s personality challenges and things of that nature. There are definitely schools out there that use multiple providers. But again, you need to pick what is best for you and I will say that there has been a lot of discussion around consolidation over the last few months.

Sara Ciskie: (36:29)
Awesome. So thinking about one of the slides earlier in your presentation around different plans that schools are putting together as they plan to go back for the fall 2020 semester, there’s obviously no textbook for how to do this, right? I think everyone’s trying to sort of figure out what works best for your university, but looking at that slide and seeing all these different options, I can understand for how an administrator that might be somewhat overwhelming, right?

Mike Rich: (36:56)
Yes.

Sara Ciskie: (36:57)
How does school make that choice, right, of what we’re going to do? What kind of variables would they consider?

Mike Rich: (37:03)
Yeah. It’s a great question. I wish I had a magic matrix that I could give you.

Sara Ciskie: (37:10)
Crystal ball.

Mike Rich: (37:11)
But the reality is every school is looking at different considerations and there are a few things that come to mind. One is the number of students who are local versus the number of students who travel in from large remote distances. If you have a large international student population, then that increases the odds that there will be some set of students somewhere that will be impacted by some form of governmental restriction on travel, for example. But if you’re a local community college and 90% of your students live in that county or the surrounding counties, then you have a better idea of what’s happening in your municipality specifically and what might happen this fall and you might choose a different approach based on that.

Mike Rich: (38:03)
Another is thinking about your physical space. We have schools who have worked with us for years, who actually are used to oversubscribing their classrooms. So they may have a lecture hall that holds 300 students and they subscribe 500 students to that lecture hall, knowing that those students can watch it on Panopto if they don’t attend in session. So rethinking your physical space and understanding those constraints is another consideration. There’s also the consideration of the faculty and the health of the faculty. So if you have a faculty population that tends to be older in age and maybe more susceptible to this illness, then you may have a more aggressive remote learning strategy than a situation where maybe for whatever reason you have a younger faculty. So there are many, many different considerations, but I think the word that keeps…

Mike Rich: (39:03)
…. Different considerations. But I think the word that keeps coming to mind is hybrid, and the other word is flexibility, in that you probably will need to have some combination of both solutions. And one of the things that I like to point out to folks, is think about those star professors that you have on your roster. The ones who have the highest course enrollment, and basically in some respects, help convince people to come to your school in the first place. What if they can’t come in to teach? What would you do to make sure that professor is still able to get online and conduct their course effectively?

Mike Rich: (39:44)
You might give them a home video recording kit that they can use to record their lectures, even over the summer, or in the early fall. You might give them more tools than you give to other professors, or you might decide that those students should not be in the classroom at all, and we will convert the classroom into essentially a broadcast studio for that professor.

Mike Rich: (40:08)
So, there are lots of different ways to solve the problem, and it can be dizzying, and intimidating. What I would suggest first, is to think through some of those key metrics that I mentioned, the health and age of your faculty, the health and age of your students, the local municipality you’re operating in, the number of people you have in who travel from large distances away, and start from that perspective. And that will give you an idea of which one of those 15 plans you might gravitate towards, one way or the other.

Sara Ciskie: (40:44)
Awesome. Couple more questions about the Panopto platform, and then we have a couple of questions about Rev’s platform as well. So around Panopto, I’m going to give you this one first. Is Panopto HIPAA compliant?

Mike Rich: (41:00)
That’s a great question. I would say, you should talk to your rep about the specifics of what your requirements are, and what you’re trying to do in a HIPAA construct. We are not used for patient to doctor communications, but we argue this for medical training. And there’s some nuances there, and I don’t claim to be an expert on all that, but there are ways that you can certainly use Panopto to facilitate complex medical scenarios, and medical education scenarios, and still use other systems for telemedicine or telehealth.

Sara Ciskie: (41:36)
Awesome. Another Panopto question. Can it remove expletive language? So can it bleep over language? Like if someone [crosstalk 00:02:42].

Mike Rich: (41:42)
Gosh, that’s a first for me. We do not filter that out automatically. Now with human captions, I imagine you could work with your caption provider and say, “Don’t caption profanity.” Might want to ask why there’s profanity in the instruction to begin with, but maybe [crosstalk 00:42:01] some overeager professors there on campus. But no, we don’t filter it out by default. But again, if that’s a requirement or something you’re interested in, talk to us, there might be solutions that I’m not aware of that could work.

Sara Ciskie: (42:19)
Awesome. Then a couple, a question here about Rev and I’m going to put these two together. So first question is, what is your accuracy for non-native English speakers for post recorded material, as well as the technical jargon like math equations and formulas? Does the professor have to go back in and edit after they get it back from Rev? And a question along the same thing was, how do we handle medical terminology? Do we have captions that’s well versed in medical terminology?

Sara Ciskie: (42:43)
So the good news about Rev.com’s platform, is all of the captioning is done by real live human beings like you and me. So we have caption-ers who are well versed in medical terminology, and our caption-ers have it in their workflow that if they don’t understand something or if a phrase or a term is new to them, they can go and research it. You also, as an end user, have the ability to submit glossaries as well. So, if there is a certain word or phrase that you know will come up over and over again, that might be a little harder to research, you can send that in as a glossary term. We do guarantee 99% accuracy with ADA and FCC compliance, so you shouldn’t have, as an end user, to go in and do any post editing after the fact.

Sara Ciskie: (43:28)
And then the next question that we have here is around … So the page that you had around the three methods of communicating. You mentioned there were three different methods of communicating with students, but not necessarily three different tools on that slide. How many tools do you think are needed to be optimized?

Mike Rich: (43:48)
I think if you have a really good unified communications tool, and a really good video platform, then you’ve covered the three use cases, because you’ve got a unified communications tool. The important thing to remember, is that both unified communications tools, and video platforms like Panopto, support that live webcasting in the middle there. So if you remember the slide visually, you’ve got the unified communications tool on one end, you’ve got the asynchronous tool on the other end, and then you’ve got this blend of live broadcast in the middle.

Mike Rich: (44:24)
The reason why it’s important to think through all three, is that there are nuances between what is offered. Like someone asked earlier, “Can you do live polling? Or can you do this, that, and the other during a live broadcast?” And depending on what tool you’re looking at, the answers are slightly different. So, I think you can solve most of them with two tools. We’ve seen some attempts where there are video providers who attempt to offer everything in one tool, and if that’s the case, you really want to test the scalability of that unified communications tool.

Mike Rich: (44:59)
Because, having live two-way communication is a very complex process. Panopto doesn’t do it. We let you pick the provider that is right for you, so that you can work with Zoom, you can work with WebEx, you can work with Teams and importantly the integrations are also an important part of the puzzle there. So, in a zoom construct with Panopto, you host your call or your webinar in Zoom. You click the record button and that’s, it shows up in your Panopto folder automatically, it gets routed to the students automatically. There’s nothing else to think about. And so, it’s not only simplifying the number of tools, but also thinking about the workflow and the touch points, ultimately for the end users.

Sara Ciskie: (45:48)
Awesome. Thank you so much, Mike, for walking us through all of this, for answering questions about Panopto itself. I know the deck does have your contact info in it as well, for those who have any follow up questions. I’m going to leave on this one last question. If you had one piece of advice for this audience, what would you leave this audience with, as far as setting their school up for success?

Mike Rich: (46:13)
Wow, that’s a great question. Do we have another hour [crosstalk 00:46:17] through that? I think the number one piece of advice, if I had to pick one, I would say pilot, pilot test it before the fall, big time. Whatever solutions you’re thinking of and looking for, get together a small group of professors, technology people, accessibility people. Get together a working group within your organization, who can run through these different tests and give you feedback on, okay, this is difficult. This I don’t understand, this is intimidating, and think through their needs and use that when selecting these tools and implementing these tools, and ultimately training the staff on how to use the tools.

Mike Rich: (47:04)
Because, the selection of the tool and the setup of that tool is really 90% of the battle. If you pick the right tool that’s reliable, and that’s easy to use, that will radically reduce the frustration that your end users have. It will radically reduce your frustration and having to support them and it will radically improve the ability of those instructors to teach your students. And ultimately, I hate to say it, but that is a form of differentiation in and of itself, is that the schools who successfully pilot test and implement at scale, just that in and of itself is going to be enough to differentiate, because there are other schools, unfortunately, who are going to continue to struggle. So make sure that your school is not one of them.

Sara Ciskie: (47:54)
Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Mike. Thanks to all who attended here, for your time as well. This is the second webinar. We have three more days left in this week, and tomorrow we’ll be running a session on how to meet [inaudible 00:48:08] needs without breaking the bank. So hopefully we’ll see you all tomorrow. Thanks so much, everyone.

Mike Rich: (48:14)
Thank you.