Panopto provides various features that enable students (and lecturers) to navigate, browse and search for videos.
Students can access Panopto from a Moodle course or the Panopto app and view all the videos in the courses they are enrolled on. Panopto's video search includes not just the video details, discussion threads and slide content, but can also cover text from videos, and screen capture, and speech captions.
Teaching staff with creator or publisher permissions on a course can add metadata and enable search options for their videos:
Title and description
These are set when you create the video, but can be edited later from the video's Settings window. It's helpful to include an accurate, brief description of the material covered in the video to help students when browsing or searching. There is no need to duplicate titles from slides, as these are also indexed by the search engine.
Chapters
If you used the option to capture PowerpointPowerPoint or Keynote when recording your video, Panopto automatically adds time-stamped chapters to your video for each slide transition (providing the slide contains text). Chapters make it easier for students to jump to the relevant point in a video and are particularly useful for students when consolidating their learning or revising a particular topic. You can edit existing chapters (both the label and the timestamp) and add or delete chapters when editing a video in the Panopto editor.
Optical character recognition (OCR)
While it's good practice to include actual text rather than an image depicting text in slides, this is not always possible. OCR identifies text in images and indexes it for search purposes. This is also useful if a video includes screen capture or a feed from a visualiser or document camera; any legible text that is on screen for at least 10 seconds can be "read" by OCR and indexed for search.
Captions
Providing captions for speech in a video is not only useful for hearing-impaired students and students whose native language is not English, but also allows spoken material to be included in search results. Panopto provides captions using Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) as well as options to use professional caption services. While ASR is free to use, departments are responsible for the cost of using professional caption services. To add captions to a video, edit the video with Panopto and on the left-hand side, select Captions and then click Import captions > Import automatic captions. From the drop-down list, select Import automatic captions. Once populated, you can edit the captions to correct any errors.
For more information on improving the quality of automatic captions, see Panopto's guidance on getting high quality captions. If you need to provide captions or transcriptions for particular students