TrustRadius Insights for Panopto are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Users of Panopto have found the software to be incredibly versatile for a wide range of use cases. From recording events, presentations, and demonstrations to capturing impromptu meetings, Panopto offers flexibility and convenience for content creation. Faculty and students have embraced the platform as a tool to provide anytime-anywhere access to educational content, aligning with the growing popularity of the flipped classroom paradigm. With Panopto's recording capabilities, students can control their individual progress by pausing, replaying, and adjusting playback speed, enhancing their learning experience. The software's availability for all users at UMBC, including faculty, staff, and students, further demonstrates its broad appeal in various academic settings.
Panopto's features extend beyond traditional lecture capture, serving as a versatile screencasting platform that enables users to record lectures, tutorials, how-to videos, and more. The software has been used extensively to archive webinars and organize/distribute training content. Its quick and easy media content capture and distribution capabilities cater to users with varying internet speeds and environments. Notably, Panopto has been adopted by an increasing number of staff members for recording lectures and creating short videos for students. Furthermore, dispersed student groups across different campuses have greatly benefited from the accessibility of Panopto, particularly when it comes to accessing assignment information and grappling with challenging teaching concepts. Overall, Panopto has transformed teaching and learning experiences across institutions by increasing engagement with students through searchable video recordings that greatly enhance their learning journey.
Panopto allows us to organize all of the videos that created and put them in a central place. It allows us to search for and categorize the vides so they can be found easily. We can also control who sees the videos based on audience. We can also get stats on who is viewing the videos.
Pros
Great captioning features
Easy uploads
Timestamps for videos
Cons
Captions aren't perfect for industry standard words
Would like more SCORM features
Sometimes there are delayed processing times after uploading
Likelihood to Recommend
Panopto is great if you have a lot of video content that you need to put in a central repository. It makes it easy to manage who sees it and how it is categorized. The captioning features are also really good too. For folks to view the video, they don't need a Panopto account. You can send them a direct link. If you want to upload videos, however, they will need a Panopto account.
If you only have a few videos or care less about usage statistics, Sharepoint may be a better file repository option.
Panopto was used mainly as a method of providing anytime-anywhere access to important educational content. Faculty and students can use it to record events, presentations, demonstrations, and impromptu meetings.
It was initially used by some early adopters at the university, but gained popularity as the "flipped classroom" paradigm grew. It allowed students to have access to information at their own pace, and when they were ready to digest it. Since people process information at different rates, having a recording that can be paused, replayed, and slowed down (or sped up) provided flexibility in terms of students controlling their individual progress.
Pros
Simple to use - It really is a click-and-go system. Log in, click on record, and you're set.
Flexible - It allows multiple information-rich inputs to be recorded simultaneously (for example, the screen, webcams, microphones, etc.). For some demonstrations, having multiple perspectives/views can be beneficial. The ability to add multiple webcams enhanced the value of some of my recordings.
Reliable - This is critical when an unforeseen opportunity arises and you want to capture it visually and with audio. I had multiple experiences where a unique person was available briefly and due to Panopto's reliability, I was able to capture content that would otherwise have been seen by only those physically present at the time.
Cons
The initial cost of ownership for our facility was a point of contention until a sufficient number of faculty and students expressed their desire to have access. I'm not sure how the pricing is determined these days, so that might have been resolved.
Tutorials for allowing multiple users to have access to content with various administrative levels would be helpful. Owners, viewers and others who aren't familiar with the options available to them might benefit from more tutorials.
It's a stretch, but having an automated system that suggests "trimming" the length of recordings that begin prior to the important content might be useful. In some cases, I would start a recording but not get done with preliminary discussions in a class for a few minutes prior to focusing on the day's material. Including that in recordings doesn't look as professional as it could, and could be considered a waste of a viewer's time.
Likelihood to Recommend
The more I used it, the more I appreciated its ease of use. If I ever ran into a situation that I felt might be a learning opportunity at some point in the future, I would simply log in, record a session, and only allow access if/when it was appropriate later. Since the more recent versions also work on mobile phones, there really wasn't a time when I couldn't record something to review or present later.
During covid, teachers didn't have access to their normal equipment, and students weren't always able to get access to a robust recording setup to do their recordings. Some students actually did recordings of presentations in their cars, or in the stairwells. Portability is powerful.
I think that we all run into situations where our presentation didn't go quite as well as we had intended. As Panopto grew, they focused more on allowing the user to control their content and perform some basic (I would argue more than basic) editing, which made actions like awkward pauses easy to "fix" as you could create smooth, blended transitions easily.
We use Panopto to record and broadcast teaching sessions, with students and learners having the opportunity to watch on their own schedule, search the lectures, and save notes directly within the system. They can pose questions and comment to the whole group, and have an organized system for themselves to reference later on. The multiple screens both shows the presenter and the presentation.
Pros
Recording of lectures: You can watch these in an organized fashion, at varying speeds
Searchability for lectures, and within a lecture, makes it particularly easy for learners to look things up
Comments and notes available privately, or publically.
Cons
Can only speed up to certain speeds - i.e. if someone wants to do 1.6x, they cannot.
Could have a simpler, or prettier user interface
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for lectures when there are >50 lectures, to help organize and search. Particularly useful when we are looking back at lectures. I am not sure this would be as useful for business style presentations, unless one has many searches.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Professional Services (501-1000 employees)
Panopto is available for all users (faculty, staff, students) at UMBC. It provides a screencasting platform for recording lectures, just-in-time tutorials, how-to videos, and more. We use to archive webinars and organize/distribute training content. Panopto allows us to capture media content quickly and easily, and distribute that media to a variety of platforms and internet speeds, which helps users who may not have the optimal environment for accessing content.
Pros
Easy to set up and record desktop with dedicated application or browser tool.
Automated speech to text generated captions for accessibility.
Simple editing tools to snip beginning and end or edit out sections in the middle.
Cons
Panopto doesn't fully support Ultra courses in Blackboard - we can do quizzing, which is very helpful, but we can't do video submissions like an Original course.
There is no built-in certificate option for completing a video and its quiz questions, which requires us to use additional systems for tracking and awarding.
Analytics are mediocre. The reporting tools are challenging to use and to get clear information on a consistent basis.
Quizzing is limited to multiple choice or T/F -- there is no reflection point or open-ended question format.
Likelihood to Recommend
Panopto is ideal for screencasting or lecture capture -- that is, recording your desktop lecture via PowerPoint or Google Slides. You can easily switch out applications for software demos, how-to videos, course tours, and more. Panopto has been successfully used for online/hybrid learning, faculty/staff training, knowledge base documentation, frequently asked questions, just-in-time support and tutorials, webinar archives, and more. Panopto is less suited for webcasting as there's a delay in the feed.
We have a sitewide license to Panopto for video hosting and playback. We have the lecture capture installed in many of the large classrooms, but not across campus. Panopto provides the hosting and streaming needs for courses and the campus. The ability to control the entire library, schedule recordings, and manage sharing and branding is the key advantage over using something like YouTube.
Pros
Recording lectures.
Playback with multiple sources to pick.
Pricing.
Cons
User Interface and Design.
Backend management.
Analytics.
Likelihood to Recommend
In the higher education market, the choices tend to boil down to Panopto or Kaltura. Panopto has a robust lecture capture system that supports a wide range of formats and inputs. The ability for the student to select the source they want to see (slides, camera view, etc.) for the lecture makes it much easier to "set it and forget it." The live transcription and searching within the video also are valuable tools. Panopto is not nearly as well polished in the backend as Kaltura (especially after Kaltura's most recent backend overhaul). On the support end, Panopto's role permission and sharing options are confusing. Its integration with the LMS is not as robust as Kaltura's, and its analytics are lacking. Panopto was more cost-effective than Kaltura.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
Panopto is available to use by the whole organization and there are more and more staff who are taking up the opportunity to use it for recording lectures and short videos for students. We often have quite dispersed student groups, over different campuses, and our most watched videos are often of assignment information and difficult teaching concepts that they need to come back to for clarity.
Pros
Easy to use and is intuitive to find your way around.
Software-based, so it's available for staff to use on many devices and helps students to access content online.
Flexible to suit the needs of users.
Cons
Captions are always a problem for us. We would like to caption all our videos and currently, the automatic captioning is not very good.
We would like integration with our VLE grade book to allow seamless submission and grading for students.
Likelihood to Recommend
Panopto is great for "one to many" deliveries for lectures as well as short video introductions, assignment, briefs and other information for students. It is less appropriate as a conferencing tool which many of our staff are looking for so that students can interact live with the presenter. Students can ask questions but it is hard to manage this if you are live streaming and presenting information.
The Panopto video capture system is integrated into our Virtual Learning Environment and used throughout our institution for the scheduled recording of Lectures. Academic and professional service colleagues also use Panpopto's personal capture system to create learning resources from the desktop. Searchable video recordings add hugely to the experience of our students.
Pros
Intuitive: ease of use and accessibility is important for all users.
Well featured and flexible: with basic editing tools easily used with more sophisticated options to organize material where required.
Reliable: crucial for our student experience
Cons
Possibly more detailed real-time feedback during lecture-room based recording.
Likelihood to Recommend
Panopto, as designed to, meets our scheduled lecture and personal recording needs extremely well. It could be used for recording less formal teaching situations, but more planning might be required.
Panopto is transforming teaching and learning across our whole institution. By utilizing the video features we have increased engagement with our students.
Pros
Enabling teachers and students to record and share easily from anywhere.
Providing reliable storage for video content.
The search functionality is impressive - not just text and descriptions, but speech and optical character recognition (OCR) built in.
Cons
Automated closed captioning is not very accurate.
Human transcribing for captioning is cost prohibitive at scale.
Annotation tools for the screen capture would be useful.
Likelihood to Recommend
Panopto is most useful for helping to engage students in learning, widening participation by increasing flexible learning opportunities, and enabling innovation with video in learning and teaching.
We primarily use Panopto for lecture capture and distance learning. Using Panopto for training and meeting recordings is something that we are just starting to leverage. Having a place to centrally store, share and search through videos has been a great value to our institution. Our integration with Panopto to D2L has provided a simple solution for instructors and students to interact 'face-to-face' even if they are located around the world.
Pros
Integration ability.
Reliability.
Ease of use.
No plugins needed to watch Panopto videos.
Auto-captions.
Cons
Recorder software can be buggy.
Likelihood to Recommend
Panopto works well to easily capture, store and share videos to the cloud. Since there are not any plugins needed to watch videos in a web browser, it becomes simple for end-users to watch videos on nearly any modern device. We use Panopto for lecture capture, training videos and students can create videos of their speeches and presentations to share.
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (201-500 employees)
We specifically purchased Panopto to be used by our faculty. Generally, the staff does not use it unless they have training material to create. Our faculty uses it to record in-person lectures so the students can review them at a later date. In our online-only classes, the faculty uses Panopto to deliver their lectures. In a few cases, faculty are using it for student assignments as well as to check the comprehension of the material.
Pros
Cloud-based
Responsive and knowledgeable tech support
Quality videos
Cons
Development has stalled
Overly complicated to use
Difficult to download multiple videos at once
Likelihood to Recommend
Panopto is good for recording lectures, whether they be in physical classrooms or by instructors sitting at their office computers. Being completely cloud-based takes the load off internal resources. Panopto is first a recorder, unlike many of its competitors which focus first on being a media library/repository. Panopto is really weak on student video assignments because it is overly complicated for a student to submit a video to an instructor's folder. It is affordable compared to the competition but does have shortcomings for student assignments.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (51-200 employees)
