An easier way to make individual recordings available to individual students
Peter Hess
Tyro
In the LTI integration, make it simpler for particular recordings to be made available to particular individuals, such as those needing an accommodation or students who are out ill. Instructors(Creators) often think that if they go to a recording, click Share, and add someone as a viewer they have provided access, but the student still can't see the recording because it is unpublished and can't be published without making it available to the entire class. What we provide instructors with is a multi-step process as simple as we could make it. The process is outlined below in abbreviated form. Needles to say, many instructors blanch when they see how complex it is and consider that in a large class they might have to repeat it many times over. Often the result is that the recordings remain unavailable.
- Go to Panopto Recordings
- Click the Create button
- Select New Folder
- Name the folder appropriately to identify the content within
- Uncheck inherit content
- Click Create folder
- In Add People and Groups type the name or names of people who should be able to view content
- Press Save
- Exit to Panopto
- Click the up arrow to return to the parent folder
- Check the (invisible until you hover) box in the upper left corner of the recording you want to copy
- Click the Copy button
- Go to the new folder to confirm that the recording has been copied
- Return to Canvas and confirm that the recording is in the new folder
Comments
Yes! For Step 4, we use the same name as the parent folder but we append " - Viewers" to the name to make it stand out as the place where you have to put copies that you want to make available to certain Viewers. We do it a bit different in that we add the individuals to each recording in that subfolder. The way you have outlined above, by putting the names on the subfolder, those Students will be able to view everything in that folder, whereas it's usually they still want to designate "Student A was sick on date A so give them access to view just date A, Student B was sick on date B so give them access to view just date B" which you would need to do by adding them on the individual recordings in the subfolder, and then we use the Email link checkbox to get that to the student.
We did something similar for courses but on a weekly basis, and to give access for a set period of time (the week they were out sick and the week after.) One problem we ran into was when at the end of the semester, the faculty wanted to open all lectures for review for finals. This required going to each folder, changing the availability of the videos and to to back to inherited permissions from Canvas. It was a bit labor intensive to do, so I would love to find an easier way to do this in the future.
In my case, recordings were already set up prior to the faculty wanting to control access by week, so it required me editing each scheduled recording to publish in the correct folder.
I have some faculty who only want to have recordings available to students that have an excused absence or sick and miss a class.
What they've asked me to do is schedule the Panopto remote recorder to record all their class sessions, but have them record to their personal folder instead of the course folder. From there they will individually email the student who needs the recording and make sure the recordign has the appropriate permissions on it so that student can view and nobody else.
We do about 40,000 captures every semester. They are all initially set to be not viewable by students. An instructor who teaches 3 courses with 3 sessions per week would have over 1000 recordings in her personal folder (from just one semester) and possibly 500 students.
Instructors often think they can go into sharing for a recording, and enter the students ID to share it, but that doesn't work because the recordings are unpublished and if they publish them all students can see them.
But they have the right intuition, I believe, of exactly how it ought to work.