Top-three university picks Panasonic for lecture capture

Edge Hill University in the north-west of England has invested in lecture technology from Panasonic and Panopto, creating a flexible space suitable for both lecture capture and large events such as

graduations.

The upgrade to the Health and Social Care faculty is part of a £250 million plus investment in to its 160-acre campus, which has seen the university named in the top three in the UK for its facilities and campus environment in the Times Higher Education magazine’s 2016 survey.

Three separate lecture theatres at the college in Ormskirk, Lancashire have been designed with complete flexibility in mind. This means for larger events such as graduations, partition walls can be moved out to reveal a 900-seat auditorium.

Each lecture theatre has a lecture capture system which combines Panasonic AW-UE70 4K remote cameras, alongside PT-RZ670 laser projectors, 65in Panasonic repeater panels (TH-65LFE8) and Panopto’s all-in-one video platform. Lecturers can control the lecture capture using an Extron controller which starts and stops the recording.

“We were concerned we’d see a drop in lecture attendance,” said Don Moffatt, media technology development manager at Edge Hill University. “The reality is that the opposite is true. We have seen more students attending the lectures – we think that’s because they can concentrate fully on the teaching without having to slavishly take notes.

“The students can focus more on what the lecturer is saying and they can use the lecture capture platform as a revision tool afterwards. The Panopto system allows them to search specific topics, and will pick these up in powerpoint text, image tags or even the words spoken by the lecturer.”

Elsewhere within the Health and Social Care faculty, Panasonic remote cameras are used to capture practical elements of the University’s Operating Department Practitioner (ODP) course. Students are required to carry out team demonstrations on everything from routine procedures to life-saving CPR exercises. These are all captured using Panasonic’s AW-HE2 remote cameras, and stored on the cloud-based Panopto system.

Kevin Henshaw, senior lecturer in Operating Department Practice (ODP), said: “A classic example is an exercise that I run with every student group, whereby I will attempt to touch the body of a ‘patient’ who is about to be shocked during CPR. It’s imperative from a safety aspect that the group is aware of who is within close proximity of the patient, yet often the group is too focused on their individual roles to notice. It’s far more powerful to have a video demonstration of what they did wrong, so they we can eliminate potentially life-threatening mistakes in the future.”

Amina Salem, a third-year ODP student who was one of the students within Henshaw’s exercise, said: “We have to write up the processes that we go through and from memory this may be only 10 or 15 things, whereas with the ability to watch back the video I’d probably be able to double or triple that. We all learned a lot from it and were able to discuss it afterwards as a group.”