The LIT Advisory Committee and Video at Wentworth working group is pleased to announce that we have selected Panopto as the institution’s next enterprise video platform.

Panopto will replace both Kaltura and Echo 360.  The new system will be in full operation for the upcoming 2018 fall semester.

Training will be provided for all members of the campus community.  LIT will announce dates and times of planned training events.  You can also reach out to the LIT team via email at lit@wit.edu and schedule an individual training consultation.

Some of the key features of Panopto include the following:

• A secure environment for hosting and sharing your video content
• Easy to use software for recording video content and live streaming
• A unique search engine for finding any word mentioned in any video
• Complete integration with Wentworth’s Learning Management System

To learn more about this exciting new teaching and learning tool, we invite you to view the short video and contact a member of the Learning Innovation and Technology team to discuss ways you can integrate video into your course design.

The LIT Advisory Committee and Video at Wentworth working group has narrowed the search for the institution’s next enterprise video solution to two finalists. They are: ilos and Panopto.

As part of the open process of selecting a new video solution, we invite and encourage you to participate in evaluating the two finalists.

Each vendor has made their final 1-hour presentations. If you are interested in participating in the review, please contact us at lit@wit.edu and we will provide you with links to the recorded presentations along with an Excel spreadsheet that we created to assist the review process. Thank you very much for your assistance, cooperation and participation in this process.

We respectfully ask that you complete your review by no later than Friday, April 6. At that time, we will need to make a decision on which vendor/product we will select.

Thank you very much to those that have already shared your feedback with us.

Where did spring semester go? It seems we were just attending the start of semester Community meeting a few days ago and now final exams are looming. Just as the semesters seem to pass faster and faster, the pace of technological change seems to be increasing too. As you may have noticed with our implementation of Office 365, we’re seeing new features regularly not major upgrades. This change in the release of features is a function of the way the applications are delivered.  Many of the modern systems we use are licensed as Software as a Service (SaaS). One of the benefits of SaaS applications is the ease with which they can be updated with little or no downtime.

As we look forward to reviewing and replacing our LMS, we will also be faced with more frequent change. All the potential LMS’s that the LMS Task Force will be evaluating are SaaS solutions.  At present our managed hosted Blackboard instance must be taken out of service for up to 12 hours for an update or upgrade to be applied. In the SaaS environment, this is not the case, features are released SaaS applications at regular intervals. In the case of Blackboard and other LMS’s new features, or updates,  are released to the system every 3 to 4 weeks.

To help the community prepare for the increasing pace of change in the LMS realm, we will begin updating or upgrading Blackboard during each semester break until we migrate to our new LMS.

The tentative near-term schedule looks like this:

• April  – update Building Blocks and cumulative update
• August – upgrade to Bb Learn 9.1, Q4 2017
• December – upgrade to Bb Learn 9.1 Q2 2018

In between these planned updates will come updates to address security or significant functionality fixes. As always, we will try to schedule the work during the pre-negotiated maintenance windows of Wednesday evenings between 8 – 10 PM for non-service impacting changes and Friday evenings between 8 PM and midnight for service impacting work. The exceptions to these will be for third-party vendors who schedule updates independent of Wentworth and for emergency maintenance.

As always, we will post announcements in Blackboard for updates and maintenance whether it interrupts service or not. For any work that we anticipate will impact Blackboard as a whole, we will send campus announcements and post within the Service Status system. For third-party vendor tool maintenance, we will announce in Blackboard and may, depending on the level of use of the tool we may also send a campus announcement.