Tool Spotlight: Panopto

What Is It?

As Northwestern's enterprise video platform and lecture capture solution, Panopto allows instructors to create, manage, and share video content with students. Panopto also provides tools that allow instructors to refine recordings, measure student engagement, and incorporate interactive learning experiences directly within their Canvas courses. Students benefit from a seamless viewing experience, while instructors can add interactivity and review viewing analytics to determine engagement and muddiest points.

At its core, Panopto is most prominently used as a lecture capture service and video management system. Instructors with built-in lecture capture capabilities in their classroom can request to have their class sessions recorded and shared through their Canvas course site. If in-class lecture capture is not possible, instructors can make their own recordings, complete with video, audio, and screen sharing using the Panopto recording app or Panopto Capture's web-based recorder on their own device. Once recordings are saved to Panopto, instructors have options to add quiz questions or to ask students to make time-stamped comments while viewing the video. Panopto also provides a built-in editable captioning service to ensure videos are accessible. Panopto now offers new AI-powered chapter and summary options.

What Do Instructors Say About It?

Panopto is one of the most widely adopted services in Canvas, with integrations in courses throughout every school and department.

McCormick School of Engineering professor Suzanne Olds appreciates the flexibility Panopto provides for her students. “They can replay something that didn't quite click the first time, whenever they need to," says Olds.

"Panopto allows me to create short, topic-focused learning modules rather than relying on lengthy recordings of live lectures," adds Casey Ankeny, also a professor in McCormick. "Students can quickly review specific concepts, engage with embedded knowledge-check questions, and revisit material as needed. These features make it easy to implement evidence-based teaching practices in a way that is both accessible and approachable, while preserving class time for active learning and problem solving."

Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences professor Aude Raymond utilizes Panopto for the listening and comprehension component of her department's innovative French Forward program. "When we redid the listening component with Panopto, I found it very easy to use," Raymond shared. "The cutting tool is particularly helpful since we decided to remove small pieces of the videos here and there. Editing captions is also very straight forward and not time consuming. We launched with the summer session 2026 and students seemed to find the assignments engaging."

How Does It Work?

Panopto is available to all Northwestern faculty, staff, and students. To access the service on the web, log in to northwestern.hosted.panopto.com. In Canvas, Panopto is available on the left-hand navigation of all courses, though instructors may need to first enable it by clicking on Settings and then Navigation in a Canvas course.

Once recordings are added to a Panopto folder in Canvas, they can be utilized in multiple ways, such as:

• Assigning a video for students to view. Points are awarded based on viewership.
• If quiz questions are added to the Panopto video, scores can be synced with the Canvas gradebook.
• Panopto can also be used for student video assignments. In this use case, students will record videos through Panopto with seamless submission to a Canvas assignment.

Using Panopto in Canvas is also helpful for sharing large video files with students since those files may be too large to be uploaded directly to Canvas.

Tool Time Updates

Keep up with the latest updates to tools supported by Northwestern IT.

• Add a custom tab to your course navigation: Canvas now offers a quick and easy way to add custom tabs to course navigation. Previously, instructors used the redirect tool which required Canvas-specific links to be updated every time the course is copied. Now the links are easy to add and are automatically updated in the course copy process.
• Close Enough: Did you know that New Quizzes offers more flexibility with fill-in-the-blank questions? "Close Enough" uses Levenshtein Distance to determine if the response is close enough to the correct answer. Levenshtein Distance is the number of single-character edits needed to change one word to another. You can also choose to ignore case.
• Padlet is a discussion and brainstorming tool previously piloted by Northwestern IT. Now Padlet is available to all faculty, staff, and students at no cost. Learn more about Padlet in the Canvas Learning Center.