Retention policies in Panopto are a systematic set of rules that helps us to:
- meet the requirements of the Retention Schedule policy, the Recording Teaching & Academic Contact Sessions Policy and the B4 and B5 conditions of registration by the Office for Students (OfS).
- pay only for recordings we need.
- make room for new recordings.
Overview of the Panopto retention policies
| Panopto folder | Panopto retention policy |
|---|---|
| Moodle folder | Rule 1 (Initial archive of Zoom recordings) – Recordings will be archived after one year since the last viewed date. – Reasoning: All recordings of delivered content for each term will be kept during the entirety of the term and through the maximum resit period (access on-demand for one year before archiving). Rule 2 (Deletion of archived Zoom recordings) – Archived Zoom recordings will be permanently deleted after two years from the archive date. |
| Assignment folders (contain student work and are located inside the Moodle folder for each module) | Rule – Assignment folders contain student work which will be permanently deleted after six years from the date they were created. – Reasoning: University retention policies for assessed student work say that student work needs to be kept for six years after a student has graduated. It is currently not technically possible for Panopto to know the graduation date, therefore student work in Panopto will be kept for six years from the creation date of the student video. |
| Channels (our Panopto folder for reusable content) | Rule Recordings will be archived after one year since the last viewed date. Recordings will never be deleted from the archive of the Channels. |
| Personal My Folder of all Panopto users. | Rule 1 (Initial archive of recordings) – Recordings inside My Folder will be archived after one year since the last viewed date. – Reasoning: Recordings in individual My Folders are a combination of aborted Zoom recordings, abandoned teaching session recordings, training videos, teaching resources and research outputs. Therefore it is difficult to enforce a permanent deletion policy without a period of archiving so that materials can be retrieved. Rule 2 (Deletion of archived recordings in My Folder) – Archived recordings, inside each user’s My Folder, will be permanently deleted after two years from the archive date. – Workaround: Recordings can be moved to the relevant Channels folder which will be archived indefinitely. |
Glossary
- Assignment folders
- Subfolders where students (added to the main folder as viewers) can add their own videos.
- Channels folder
- A set of folders that: a) are outside the Moodle folder structure, b) are designed for reusable recordings, c) will remain active or archived and never deleted (i.e. public lectures and research outputs).
- Moodle folder
- All Moodle courses have a synced folder for their recordings in the Moodle folder section. These include term videos and other uploaded content for teaching.
- Retention policy
- A named policy that can be applied to individual folders. A policy can have one or more retention rules.
- Retention rule
- The rules that make up a retention policy, i.e. a rule can be applied to all recordings that are created via the Zoom integration.
- Term videos
- Recordings of teaching such as direct teaching (i.e. lectures), seminars and workshops.
Background
In 2020, Panopto replaced the previous lecture capture system with a University Video Library. It was used to store all sessions, meetings, and classes from 2020-2021 during the pandemic and has since been curated to ensure that only large meetings, training sessions and direct teaching (i.e. lectures) were captured. This has resulted in a tiered system of retention of recordings that includes archived hours (recordings that have not been accessed for 13 months); stored hours (which are active recordings that have been either recently created or watched); and created hours (recordings that have recently been created by either Zoom integration or direct to Panopto recording).
We are also trying to balance the affordances of technology and the restrictions of the policies, so that students and staff maintain access to the content they need, and we don’t overburden University platforms’ capacity. Therefore to reduce our archive and stored hours, to make room for more recordings in future, we propose the below retention policies to control archival and deletion of old and unnecessary recordings.