Stephen Laster at Panopto: AI-Powered, Visual and Auditory-Based Video, and a Focus on the Learning Moment
A Q&A with Stephen Laster
At Campus Technology, we've followed Stephen Laster's career through more than two decades of senior leadership roles, "driving impact," as he says, at organizations leading some of the most significant directions and change in the technology and education markets. His work has included positions at McGraw-Hill Education, Ellucian, Harvard Business School, and Babson College. Most recently, he was president of D2L. Here, we ask Laster for an update since taking the helm as CEO at Panopto this past May, 2025.
Mary Grush: For 20-plus years, you've worked in a diverse range of technology markets. About four months ago, you chose to move to Panopto. What makes Panopto a good fit for your career now?
Stephen Laster: That's a great question. I always look at the opportunities and organizations I join through the lens of, "How can I bring what I do well to drive impact?" And I've done that for my entire career.
Panopto resonates deeply, Mary, as we've shared in prior conversations about dyslexia. I personally learn differently, just as a lot of the world learns differently. I am very much a visual and auditory-based learner. I actually have a near-perfect visual memory, so I can see things from many, many years ago, but as a proud dyslexic, I don't really learn that well from books.
The opportunity to join Panopto has come at a time when the world needs better access to education — now more than ever. I believe that Panopto allows institutions to reach learners with all kinds of learning styles and different ways of thinking, particularly visually and auditorily. I think that's very important right now, and I'm happy that I can help make an impact on that front.
Grush: Video has been around for quite a while in education, of course, but is it becoming even more important to education? How is that reflected in Panopto's mission?
Laster: To answer that I'd like to bring the conversation back to visual and auditory learners. Video has long been and continues to be very important, but let's just break it down for a minute. Panopto was born to solve a really important problem: How do we capture, through video and through audio, what's happened in the classroom? And then, how do we make use of that — to extend the classroom, or for remediation, or to create subsequent content to engage other learners who weren't present? That mission remains incredibly important.
Further, the advent of AI has made doing all of that much more scalable. It's allowed us to do things like better summarization, or better transcription at a lower cost, while breaking down barriers of language, culture, and learning style.
And now, we have the advent of Elai, which I'm very excited about. We've recognized that not everything happens in lecture anymore. There are some amazing ideas in learning institutions that are captured statically — in pictures, text, or PowerPoints. Through Elai, we're able to unlock static content and turn it into avatar-driven video with feedback, and strikingly, with engagement.
Through Elai, we're able to unlock static content and turn it into avatar-driven video with feedback, and strikingly, with engagement.
Again, the problem Panopto was created to solve is how to extend the classroom in ways that leverage visual and auditory-based learning. Is that still important today? It's absolutely critical now, as, for example, it becomes more difficult for students to get to physical classrooms for various reasons, or as AI and other forces disrupt what it means to maintain a set of skills, causing people to go back for re-education. The ability to learn things through video, through visual and auditory-based learning, allows many, many more people to acquire the skills they need to be successful. I think that's pretty cool.
The ability to learn things through video, through visual and auditory-based learning, allows many, many more people to acquire the skills they need to be successful.
Grush: What does "AI-powered video learning" mean for Panopto? I had seen that phrase a few times, and I wondered what it means to you.
Laster: Maybe a way to conceptualize what this means, is that Panopto believes, first and foremost, as I've always believed, that learning is inherently human.
In many ways, learning is very much about community and shared experience. But we also recognize that we need to deliver education in ways that scale for what are inherently human differences, and technology-supported learning is one of the levers to create better scale.
So, in that light, we use AI purposefully to reduce the cost and time it takes in the production and in the findability of the experience. We also use it to help make the resulting learning objects smarter, meaning taking an entire video and "chunking" it into segments that make sense, using it to summarize where that makes sense, or using it to transcribe so we don't have language barriers. So, like any technology, we're applying AI in natural workflows that allow the student to maximize their investment of time on task and to be successful; to maximize the outcome, I should say. We do all this in ways that allow the instructional designer and faculty member to use what is a compelling approach to learning — in ways that don't require them to become technologists.
We're applying AI in natural workflows that allow the student to maximize their investment of time on task and to be successful.
And we do all that in partnership with the leading LMS providers, and with a real focus on both faculty and student success.
Grush: Could you take a moment to give us a scenario of what "chunking" might look like from the student perspective?
Laster: Sure. If you look at an instructor's materials, they are naturally segmented. And AI can use that, whether it's PowerPoint titles, or chaptering, or different pieces of materials, or even if it's just the course session focus. There's a natural segmentation to it.
The remarkable thing about generative AI today is that it can look for those patterns, recognize them, and then find the specific timings in the video that correlate with them. Then, AI can break these findings up into different units bound by that title or that section. So as a student, I've got a more robust search facility to go back to, for review and practice or study that's specifically what I'm looking for — versus having to scroll through an hour lecture to find the right point.
So let's say it's Sunday night. I'm a student and I'm super stressed. I can't remember what "break even" is in microeconomics! I don't have time to scroll through an hour of content to find it, and I'm starting to get really discouraged. But I learn that I can actually find just what I need: I search for and retrieve only "break even" with an AI search. I feel happily productive again!
Some of this sounds pretty basic, and chunking in some form made its debut long before the incorporation of AI made the technology exponentially more productive. But the absence of these kinds of enabling capabilities can mean the difference between a student engaging and studying and succeeding, or a student getting dangerously frustrated.
Many of us forget, speaking only about the U.S. for a second, that the vast majority of learners in this country are either in corporate America, in jobs, with families, or are having other stresses that put pressure on their time. So the benefit here is the fact that we can help them focus on the learning and remove the stress of findability and understandability. We can help them drink in concepts and try those concepts on… In my experience, we're contributing to substantially better student outcomes and maybe even a healthier life.
Grush: Thanks, that's helpful. Could you provide a quick view of Elai as well?
Laster: Of course. Think about how we can create avatar-based video learning with Elai. We can literally take a professor's notes and ideas — ordinarily presented as static, rather flat materials, like PowerPoint texts and lecture notes, and turn them into an avatar-based visual and auditory immersive environment that can check for knowledge. So, with the click of a few buttons, the professor's lecture and discussion can be made available to students, to refresh, to remediate, and to practice. Content that in the past might remain "locked up" and inaccessible can now become engaging, heavily utilized interactive resources. And all of this becomes findable and can be made available to the LMS in ways the faculty can determine.
Grush: The video learning market is growing, with several prominent players today. What's making Panopto a leader in that market?
Laster: First thing, kudos to everybody in this market, because having a broader market helps educators understand the importance of the solution. But having said that, I think what makes us different is that we're very focused on the learning moment. Some of our competitors have expanded into marketing solutions and other adjacencies. We've not.
I think what makes us different is that we're very focused on the learning moment.
Our vision from the beginning has been to help educators and students of all ages and all stages learn, and that's what we're focused on today as excitedly as the day the company was founded. So number one, I think what makes us special is that we care about learning in higher ed, in corporate America, and for life. And we care about creating learning moments with pedagogies that embrace visual and auditory-based learning. I think if you look at many of our competitors, they try to do other things in addition. This may come at a price.
So that's a strong number one. Number two, we are driven about ease of use and elegance, not for its own sake, but we're expressly driven by jobs to be done, and done well. We work in service of our instructional designers, faculty, students, and consultants. I think everyone at Panopto wakes up each day obsessed with ensuring that our software makes it easier for users to do their jobs. And as straightforward as that sounds, it's actually hard to do. But I think we do it well.
And then thirdly, we do have brilliant technologists on the team who are not enamored with a technology simply for its own sake, and we have great partners — leading companies like Anthropic, Microsoft, and others.
I think it bears repeating, it's not just about what the technology can do. Every filter we have is through the lens of how we are making it easier to create, deliver, and learn from education that's delivered through technology focused on visual and auditory-based learning.
Grush: What will help institutions succeed with new levels of video integration — with more and more video?
Laster: First thing, many institutions are already succeeding beautifully with Panopto's offerings. We have more than 1,300 customers for whom Panopto is core to their delivery, and that number is growing every day. Our most successful institutions are the ones that truly understand that the ways people learn are changing right before our eyes.
Our most successful institutions are the ones that truly understand that the ways people learn are changing right before our eyes.
That said, successful institutions are set up to partner with us and with others to create purposeful change in how they deliver instruction, so that time in the classroom is really taking advantage of people being together, and so that the definition of a course (and course materials) is structured in a way such that time away from the classroom is leveraging technology to drive both self-sufficiency and community.
And doing all that through video, through avatar-based visual and auditory learning is a fantastic way to allow students of all ages to engage with new ideas self-sufficiently. And so, institutions that are successful are reinventing their delivery. And we're right alongside, helping them as a partner.
Avatar-based visual and auditory learning is a fantastic way to allow students of all ages to engage with new ideas self-sufficiently.
Grush: Where would you place AI-powered video learning and all the related tools like Elai in the range of opportunities to affect the kind of change and drive the kind of impact you've strived for throughout your career?
Laster: In the past 25 to 30 years, we've had just a handful of major technology transformations that have truly helped open access to quality education and have helped students become more successful in taking real ownership for their own learning. With AI-powered video learning we're at another one of those inflection points, and it's very exciting.
We, at our institution or in the vendor community, have an obligation to work together to seize this moment. Many of us are doing that, and I'm certainly proud to be part of it. If the difficult global problems that we're seeing today are going to be solved, we will get there by having more educated people, not fewer.
We can help do this with the technology I've described here today, applied well — with teaching and learning and people in the center of everything we do, because learning is inherently human. This is another one of those moments in which we can create positive, even transformative change. For everyone who learns better or learns well visually and auditorily, and for those who don't have access to campus every day, I'm happy we're helping them. And we all need to continue to work together.
About the Author
Mary Grush is Editor and Conference Program Director, Campus Technology.