Faculty launches fully automated lecture recordings

A project to fully automate lecture recordings across the Faculty has proved successful following a busy first term.

For the first time, recordings of lectures across the Faculty are now being automatically scheduled based on data in Celcat, the College's timetabling system.

With all but one of the Faculty’s departments now utilising this integration, the impact of this project is already being felt. Over the course of this academic year, 10,918 recordings are scheduled across 64 Panopto-enabled rooms, providing assistance to nearly 6,000 students and over 400 academic staff.

The automatic recording of lectures in Panopto, the College's recording platform, enables increased usage and creates more recorded lectures for students, while also simplifying the setup process during lectures for academic staff, who no longer need to manually start each recording.

There has been a high level of accuracy for lectures being scheduled in the new integration, and early indicators show than on average there has been a 46% increase in the number of recorded lectures available for viewing across the Faculty.

Professor Omar Matar, Vice-Dean for Education, said: "The successful completion of the integration project demonstrates the Faculty's commitment to innovate technologically and improve the student experience.

"The project team has worked tirelessly to implement this huge change, which has already been gratefully received across the Faculty."

Initiated by the Faculty’s rebranded Ed Tech Team, the project first took shape in 2016 and has involved ICT, Central Timetabling Support Office and the Faculty of Natural Sciences.

Shireen Lock, Principal Learning Technologist and project lead for Engineering, said: "The Faculty has a large number of lecture rooms and Celcat events, so this was an ambitious project that required huge vision to achieve.

"The collaborations gained from the project have enabled us to commence discussions with Faculty colleagues on a variety of associated best practice areas such as room booking and lecture room practice."

To find out more about the automated scheduling project, or for information about Panopto, please contact the Faculty of Engineering’s Ed Tech Team.