As we flagged last month, due to a change in licensing arrangements and considerably increased costs that affect stored content in Panopto, the University needs to change the way it manages this content in the future. This also coincides with the requirement of the University Teaching Capture policy, introduced in 2021, to remove recorded lectures from the system two years after the year in which they were captured.
The University has been using the Panopto lecture capture system since early 2009 and, since then, over 12.5 million minutes of video have been captured (or around 14,000 hours of video per year) – all of which is currently still being stored on the system. And over 50,000 hours of this content hasn’t been viewed in the last 13 months.
The University Education Quality and Standards committee (EQSC) has approved the introduction of an archiving and retention process within Panopto from the new academic year. This is to ensure we only pay for the recordings we need to store (and are actually being viewed), while also meeting the requirements of the Teaching Capture Policy, the Records Retention Schedule and the B4 and B5 conditions of registration from the Office for Students.
What do you need to do?
At present, the good news is that for the vast majority, you will not need to do anything as the archiving and deletion processes will run automatically.
If you have an old recording that is no longer used, but you wish to keep, we would recommend that you download this and store it locally in, for example, your University OneDrive space.
After the archiving process has run, we would also suggest you check that any recordings you have made that are designed to be reused are still available and have not been archived in error – this shouldn’t happen if they have been viewed within the last 13 months.
How is this going to happen?
Recordings will be archived or moved to the recycle bin for deletion on 6 September 2024.
We have broken the existing content into two broad groups:
- All content recorded pre- 31 August 2018
- All content recorded post-1 September 2018
All content that was recorded before 31 August 2018, and that has not been viewed in the last 13 months, will be marked for deletion. Deleted recordings will be stored in the Panopto recycle bin for 90 days before permanent deletion.
Content recorded after 1 September 2018 will, for the most part, be archived from September 2024 and kept for up to 6 years in archive storage. The exception to this will be lecture capture recordings made in AY 2021/22, which have to be deleted 2 years following the end of the year in which they were recorded, in line with the Teaching Capture policy (3.21) and in accordance with Ordinance 22.4. This will be an annual process with lecture capture recordings being deleted annually, 2 years following the end of the year in which they were recorded.
Important to note
Recordings moved to the archive will still be retrievable and it will be possible for those with authorised access (both staff and students) to restore a recording, should it still be needed. Restoring a recording from the Archive will take up to 48 hours, depending on the length of the recording, and guidance on how to do this is available from the Teaching Hub.
This does not affect how Panopto will continue to be used going forward. Following improvements to the Panopto Scheduler tool earlier this year, all teaching staff will still be able to schedule recordings for the new academic year direct to their relevant Moodle-linked folder, and students will still be able to access recordings made within their units on Moodle, or directly in the Panopto site.
This year we have a huge amount of data to either remove or archive but, in the future, archiving will become an annual, routine process (scheduled for September each year), that will help us to ensure we are only storing and paying for active, in use recordings on the live Panopto site.