Positioned in an even narrower band than Learnist, Panopto is a social learning application centered around video as the medium and targeted toward corporate/enterprise audiences as well as the education field.
On the corporate level, specialists and managers can video-record instructional material using Panopto. The instructions Panopto highlights are the kinds of procedural or technological processes, often proprietary within the corporation, that usually are lost when an employee moves on. This necessitates repeated instruction by other specialists who must relearn the given process and then repeat it to multiple end-users.
In the classroom setting, Panopto proposes a concept it calls the “flipped classroom.” According to Panopto’s website, this model allows “…students [to] watch pre-recorded lectures before class, then use in-class time for discussion and engaging activities.” While it doesn’t go into how students might feel when faced with what they might perceive as ‘double class time,’ the website states that students “are more engaged” with the subject when they are prepped using the flipped classroom model.
Panopto is positioned as a video tool with a highly focused intent and clearly defined users as its targeted audience. The same users might use the Learnist business category for some of the same purposes, but a quick glance at the Learnist Business page reveals general (though helpful) business topics. They are news articles, “items of interest” including tips on how to dress, common sense success secrets, marketing to millenials – these items have their own ‘boards’ and keep the reader interested and engaged. But the audience drawn in will be the general reader, not necessarily engaged in business at all.
Theoretically, the Learnist platform is broad enough so you could include boards on some corporate business process, but then you’d have to close it off from the general public. Panopto’s tools are designed for the closed corporate intranet.
Panopto only presents serious competition for Learnist in a narrow, highly defined arena. It is much more of a curation as well as an instructional application, centered around video, and as such I doubt you could call it serious competition in the sense of taking away significant business from Learnist.
Click here for Gartner’s 2/27/15 press release on emerging technology trends in education. The article cites ten trends on the horizon, heading this way.
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