Panopto Service Policy

Bryn Mawr College maintains a subscription to Panopto, a cloud-based "lecture capture" and video-streaming service, which students, faculty, and staff can use to record, stream and share audio and video recordings.

• All College community members who use Panopto are subject to Panopto’s terms of service.
• Panopto’s privacy policy explains what data the company collects from users and how the company uses that data.
• This document outlines additional internal, college-specific policies that LITS has adopted to manage Panopto as a service for the Bryn Mawr College community. These internal policies augment, but in no way override, Panopto’s.

Terms of Use

As with any College-provided IT resource, all users must follow the terms of Bryn Mawr College’s Acceptable Use Policy when using Panopto; failure to do so may result in the penalties outlined in that policy.

Data Collection and Privacy

Panopto’s policies explains the rights that you and Panopto have with respect to the User Content (e.g., video and audio files, comments; see terms of service for definition) you create or upload to Panopto and any Personal Data generated by your use of Panopto (see privacy policy). Personal Data includes “Usage Statistics” generated as you interact with the site, such as time-stamped information about the recordings you view/listen to and download, and how long you spend viewing them.

This policy clarifies only who at Bryn Mawr College can see User Content and Usage Statistics.

Permissions on Panopto are role-based:

• Users who create or upload audio or video recordings to Panopto have "Creator" permissions for those recordings. Creators can:
  • Edit and download their own recordings;
  • Give other users Creator or Viewer access to them;
  • View Usage Statistics for them, including timestamped, identified data about who viewed or listened, which parts they viewed or listened, and how long they spent viewing or listening.
  • Control what permissions Viewers have; specifically, whether they can download recordings, add bookmarks and annotations, and view bookmarks and annotations added by others. 
• Users with “Viewer” access to a recordings can play them; they may be able to add annotations and bookmarks or download for offline viewing if Creator(s) allow. Users cannot view Usage Statistics.
• The Panopto-Moodle integration automatically creates Panopto folders for Moodle courses that contain Panopto blocks: 
  • “Teachers” and “Non-Editing Teachers” in the Moodle course have Creator roles for the corresponding Panopto folder
  • “Registered students” or “Auditors” have Viewer roles.
• A small number of Library and Information Technology Services (LITS) staff have Admin or Videographer roles on Panopto and can access all User Content and view all Usage Data related to the College’s account.
  • Admins and videographers use content and/or data pertaining to individual, identified users to the extent needed to:
    • Keep the system running,
    • Help users troubleshoot and fix technical issues
    • Provide the Honor Board or Offices of the Undergraduate Dean, the Dean of the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, or the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences with data and information needed to adjudicate questions of credit and academic integrity.
  • Admins may also compile, store, and share aggregated, anonymized Usage Statistics as needed for the purposes of educational research and college business, but this data will not be traceable to identifiable individuals.

All use of data collected and stored in Panopto, including use by Admins, is governed by the terms of Bryn Mawr College’s Data Handling Policy; failure to observe these terms can result in the penalties described in that policy. Files downloaded from Panopto, including but not limited to recordings, caption files, and User Statistic reports should also be used, transmitted, and stored in a manner consistent with Bryn Mawr College’s Acceptable Use and Data Handling Policies.

FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) law also governs the use of any student educational records collected and stored on Panopto, such as recordings students create for a course or student viewing data. Information about the rights and responsibilities created by this law and related College policies

Record Retention

Panopto is a video-streaming service and is designed for content that is routinely viewed. Although our Panopto license does not have storage limitations, videos will be automatically archived if they have not been viewed for three years to improve site performances. Archived videos remain discoverable on the site and can be restored by creators or viewers at any time. 

Creators can also delete or “unshare” their own recordings, and LITS strongly recommends deleting recordings containing identifiable persons once they are no longer needed as a privacy best practice.

If you need long-term, archival storage for recordings that will not be routinely viewed, please contact LITS (help@brynmawr.edu).