Recording teaching

To facilitate accessibility and inclusion the university expects synchronous sessions to be recorded where appropriate and feasible. It is expected that you try to record as much as possible to ensure that your learners can watch and review content to support their learning. This is particularly important for international students and students with disabilities, but it is beneficial to all learners. You are not required to record sessions which are inappropriate for sharing (i.e. due to personal nature, business confidentiality, etc), are practical labs/workshops that would be difficult to record, or are largely interactive rather than lecture-style deliver. 

In addition to recording synchronous sessions you can create stand alone audio-visual resources to support your learners. For example, you might record a talking head or voice over slides/screen recording to explain particular elements of a subject or to demonstrate a skill. You’ll need to do this type of recording to create your assessment briefs as required in the assessment for learning policy.

To ensure accessibility of recorded materials you should upload all recordings to Panopto where they will be auto-captioned, and embed them in the relevant area of your Blackboard module or course. Panopto is one of the tools within the UniLearn umbrella that works with Blackboard to help manage access to audio-visual content. It also has tools for recording, editing and captioning your content. Guidance on how to use Panopto is available on the Digitally Enabled Education (DEE) webpages. 

There are many tools available to allow recording of synchronous and asynchronous content. Whichever option you choose to record and/or edit video with you should place the finished recording on our Panopto cloud

If you are delivering online/hybrid sessions via Teams or Collaborate then you can use the record function within these tools. Once a recording from Teams or Collaborate is complete you should download and upload it to Panopto to help manage access, retention and accessibility. 

If you are recording a synchronous session in-person then you can use Panopto to record. For this you can download the Panopto recorder app from UniApps or use the web-based version, Panopto Capture.  

When recording sessions with students present (whether online or in-class) they must be made aware that recording is happening and the recording must be made in the legitimate interests of teaching and learning. More information on GDPR, privacy and recordings is available on the DEE Panopto webpages (go to the Privacy section).  You should familiarise yourself with the USW Privacy Notice around recordings. If you have any questions about this area please contact the DEE team.

Recording learning activities helps to improve accessibility and inclusion for our learners, and contributes to an inclusion by design approach. It ensures that they do not miss out on content if unable to attend, and allows them to review content as necessary (this can support a variety of learner needs such as dyslexia, neurodiversity, learning in a second language, etc). Find out more about inclusive practises on the CELT website. 

To help USW comply with UK Accessibility Regulations it is required that all video content is captioned within 14 days. All content on the Panopto system is automatically captioned so please ensure that any recordings made on Teams/Collaborate/other systems are moved to Panopto. Please note that as these captions are machine generated they are not always accurate. The captions can be edited to improve accuracy. If you require fully accurate transcription of a recording (ie to support a disabled learner) then you can request that a recording is captioned by a human transcriber. Please contact your learning technology partner if you require this service. For more information about accessibility requirements please read the Digital Accessibility pages.

The Panopto accessibility page outlines further accessibility features.