A Cheat Sheet to Panopto’s Integration with Blackboard Learn

As our university continues its transition to Panopto from Tegrity, I thought I’d share how the Blackboard Integration works since there isn’t much information available online. As we continue to implement Panopto, I will be updating this post with additional information.

How It Works

When a Blackboard course is provisioned in Panopto, the following three items are created:

• Course Folder – A folder is created in Panopto for the designated course. It is typically titled [Blackboard Course ID]:[Blackboard Course Title].
• User Group for Creators – A User Group will be created for all instructors in the course. The creator user group allows users to create recordings and manage course settings. This is titled [Blackboard Course ID]:[Blackboard Course Title]::Creators.
• User Group for Viewers – A second User Group is created for all other users in the course. The viewer user group gives users view-only access to videos in the course folder. This is titled [Blackboard Course ID]:[Blackboard Course Title]::Viewers.

User Enrollments

While user groups are created during the course provisioning process, users are not automatically added to their respective groups. A user first has to login to Panopto, and through a background process, they are added or removed from the necessary user groups. This enrollment sync is done each time a user logs into Panopto via Blackboard.

Course Merges

When a Blackboard course is merged, users of the child course(s) are enrolled in the parent course’s Panopto User Groups. When a course is unmerged, users will be unenrolled from the parent course’s User Group and be enrolled in the child course’s User Group.

Note: When child course students access Panopto, they will see the title of the parent course instead of the child course.

Course Copies

When completing a course copy that contains a provisioned a Panopto course, the user groups of the new course will be added to the source course as viewers. Please see below for a detailed view of this workflow.

Copy Course A to Course B

1. Course B’s Panopto folder will be provisioned automatically.
2. Course B’s Creator and Viewer user groups will be added as viewers to Course A’s folder.

Copy Course B to Course C

1. Course C’s Panopto folder will be provisioned automatically.
2. Course C’s Creator and Viewer user groups will be added as viewers to Course B’s folder.

Important: At this point, any videos stored in course A will be inaccessible to course C users as their user groups were added to course B instead of course A. If a student attempted to view a video, they would receive an Access Denied error message.

For System Administrators

Restrict Group Membership Visibility
*Important for FERPA*

When enabling the Blackboard integration, it is crucial that the Restrict group membership visibility setting is updated. By default, this feature is set to ‘False’ which will allow users to view the membership of a user group that they are not enrolled in. Given that a user group contains the list of students in a course and the user group title is typically the course name, this would make a student’s course schedule known to other people. This can be prevented by changing the setting to ‘True.’