Online learning can do more than replicate what happens in a classroom. Used effectively, it can extend educational opportunities beyond geographical boundaries, connect learners with industry expertise, and make valuable knowledge available to much wider audiences.
Throughout PANEURAMA, online and hybrid delivery has played an important role in connecting higher education with the fast-moving animation, games and VFX industries.
Alongside its research, Guidelines & Recommendations and other project activities, PANEURAMA has built a growing collection of recorded educational content and livestreams for the PANEURAMA SkillBASE — a digital knowledge hub designed to make industry-relevant learning available beyond the lifespan of an individual class or event.
But expanding educational reach also raises a practical question: how do we produce online learning that works well technically, reaches the right audiences and can continue to create value after the live session ends?
Learning through practice
Expand Your Educational Reach: Best Technical Practices for Online Content Production, developed by the Animationsinstitut at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, brings together practical findings from PANEURAMA’s experience of running and testing online content production between September 2023 and May 2026.
Rather than approaching online delivery theoretically, the publication draws on solutions explored and tested during the project. It provides practical guidance across three key areas: extending active Zoom classes through passive livestreaming; using vMix to deliver content to multiple audiences and create more sophisticated productions; and recording individual video and screen-share feeds for greater flexibility in post-production
Extending the audience beyond the virtual classroom
One of the simplest ways to expand the reach of an online class is to separate those who need to participate actively from those who primarily want to watch.
The practices explore how an interactive Zoom session can simultaneously be livestreamed to external platforms. Speakers and key participants can remain within the Zoom environment, while a potentially much larger audience follows the session through platforms such as YouTube or LinkedIn. Questions can still be gathered through platform chats and moderated without disrupting the active learning environment.
Crucially, livestreaming also creates opportunities beyond the live event. Sessions can be recorded and made available on demand, allowing educational content to continue reaching learners who could not attend at the original time.
Creating more flexible and professional online content
For organisations looking for greater production control, the paper also explores the integration of vMix with Zoom.
This enables multiple speakers, presentations, screen shares, graphics and titles to be brought together into a designed programme and streamed simultaneously to multiple destinations. The publication takes readers through a practical example, from preparing the Zoom session and configuring individual sources to creating split screens, lower thirds and streaming destinations.
The same approach can also support higher-quality recording. By capturing webcams and screen shares as separate files, educational sessions can become much more flexible assets for editing, repurposing and archiving after the event itself.
Quality matters
Expanding reach is only valuable if learners can comfortably engage with the content.
The publication therefore closes with practical recommendations for improving video and sound quality, including microphone choice and positioning, room acoustics, camera placement, lighting, framing and Zoom settings. Often relatively small improvements to the recording environment can significantly improve the clarity and professionalism of an online educational experience.
From a live session to a lasting educational resource
Across these practices is a simple opportunity: online educational content does not have to disappear when a class, webinar or workshop ends.
With the right technical setup, a single educational activity can serve an active group of learners, reach a wider live audience and become an on-demand resource that continues to support skills development afterwards.
Expand Your Educational Reach shares the practical approaches tested through PANEURAMA to help educators, institutions and content producers make that possible.
