Recording teaching content, whether in the classroom or from your desk, and making recordings available to students, can give students the opportunity to re-watch content, enhance note taking and revise topics. This assists all students not just those with additional support needs.
However, these recordings can be made more inclusive and useful to students by following a number of simple practices.
Using the microphone
It is extremely important to use the microphones (where they are available) in the lecture theatres to ensure the best recording quality. ITS have written some guides to assist with this using a hand held microphone or a lapel microphone.
Adding notes to the slides
Adding notes to slides, whether within PowerPoint or alongside the recording, can make a big difference to how inclusive this learning resource becomes. Not only does it enable the student to draw upon the key points you make during the recording it also helps to provide an alternative to a transcript of what was said. You can either add notes to the PowerPoint slides in the note section (potentially converting this into a handout).
Making the slides available to download alongside the recording
Making the slides available allows students to annotate and add notes to their slides either manually or digitally. By uploading them to Blackboard (Course Resources) alongside the link to the recording, they can be downloaded by students and makes learning more flexible.
Using holding slides to help students navigate within the recording
Sometimes, within a recorded session, students will be participating in active learning and this part of the recording may be less useful to students. Consider using a place holder slide in your presentation which makes it easy for students to skip to the next part of the recording.
Using the keyword search to aid navigation within the recording
You can easily navigate through a recording using the search function which allows you to use keywords to search the recording or add notes to get back to specific point in the recording.
Use the Panopto app to view recordings on your mobile device
You can download and use the Panopto app on Android and iOS (iPhone/iPad) devices to view recordings. This enables you view them at time which and location which suits you.
Making students aware of these features
It is important to inform students how to access the features of a recording which support an inclusive learning experience. Consider doing this during your first recorded session or create a short recording from your desktop to share with students.
Find out more about Panopto’s accessibility features
Captioning recordings
Panopto has an ASR (automatic speech recognition) captioning feature which is applied by default to all new recordings. Viewers can make these closed captions visible by clicking on the CC icon below the video player. Machine-generated captions are not 100% accurate, but a caption editor is available for you to improve accuracy. These Panopto guides explain how to add automated captions to your recordings or how to manually upload your own captions.
Alternatively, you may want to pay for a transcription or captioning service which offers up to 99% accuracy. Companies which provide this service (e.g. Rev.com) charge approx $1 per minute and often have a 24 hour turnaround time.