Ability to replace the media button in the new RCE with our media platform of choice

[burrielr]

The move to put all LTI plugins into a dropdown is going to severely impact media usage at our institution as presently our faculty and students are accustomed to pressing an existing button on the old RCE when inserting media into their Canvas content. Having to select a dropdown menu to find their media option hidden therein means that most won't find the option at all. To have a different media button in the toolbar (the native Canvas media integration) front and center presents a situation with our users will instinctively press on that button.

Compounding matters is that depending on screen/browser size, the "PLUGIN" button in RCE may not appear, replaced instead with a 3 button "MORE" button, meaning as many as 3 clicks to get to the 3rd party media platform of the school's choice.

Here is the toolbar on wide screens with the browser fully expanded:

Here is the toolbar on narrower screens or with the browser not fully expanded:

Yet another compounding factor is that Canvas uses the terminology "My Media" in the native Canvas media integration, a term already regularly used elsewhere, specifically for schools using the Kaltura LTI plugin.

To present users with two DIFFERENT "My Media" elements, each going to different media repositories would be catastrophic, resulting in endless user support headaches.

We propose that Canvas administrators should be able to choose which media platform we want for that button (be it Kaltura, Panopto, YouTube, or Instructure's Canvas Studio, etc.)

Short of that, alternatives include:

- Ability to remove the native Canvas media button from the new RCE

*AND*

- Ability to select one or two LTI integrations of the administrator's choosing to appear on the new RCE in a position of their choosing rather than in the plugin dropdown

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the Canvas Deploy Notes (2020-08-26)

[alex7]

For a (somewhat) succinct recording about this request, please see Canvas RCE - Embed Media Issues and Feature Request (Revised) 20200206.

[JACOBSEN_C]

YES!  That's a damn-fine video summary of the issue, and we are exactly on the same page!  Here-Here! And seconded forthwith by Fort Lewis College and the entirety of our Canvas instance.  Well done!

[Linkletter]

This is incredibly useful, thank you.

[alex7]

The Winter 2020 Update blog post from Instructure's Learning Activities team includes screenshots of what the LTI button favoring process will look like. Favorited LTIs will appear to the far right of the toolbar. The post notes, "I know Kaltura is a really popular media tool for content, and we want to make sure that things are working as you expect before July. I’ll be reaching out to a handful of you via CSMs so we can get that right." This impacts not just institutions that use Kaltura for media management in Canvas, but also Panopto, YuJa, and even Instructure's own Studio (formerly Arc) product.

So, I want to be clear that we still need the following: 

1. The ability to specify the placement of the favorited LTIs in the toolbar.
2. The ability to hide the built-in Record/Upload Media menu so we can guide users to our preferred tool.

I commented on the blog post noting the above. I'd suggest all interested parties comment and/or like comments on that post was well.

[burrielr]

Alex, thanks for your additional testing on this front. It is as I featured. This solution isn't really much of a solution. Two video buttons on a tool bar, with our preferred video button all the way at the end, and the wrong video button front and center... that's going to cause no end of trouble for our users, and headaches for the people who have to support them.

[meichin]

Hi! We turned on the new RCE for everyone and found that folks had more trouble than we thought they would with it, especially finding the spot to upload Kaltura, which is our second most important tool, after Canvas.     I am looking forward to some of the updates that Canvas is making to it to make it easier for our instructors to use. Thanks so much for listening!

[alex7]

Thanks for this feedback and confirmation about what we're fearing with Kaltura and other external media tools. It  seems like a good place to get heard in is Instructure's blog posts. Please visit the Learning Activities - Spring 2020 Update post and comment there. You could even +1 my comment from today 😉

[tim_kato]

We use Kaltura at UBC and this would be very beneficial

[dslauson]

This is a big issue for our institution as well.  The original poster's description of the problem is exactly correct.  Please give us a way to route the default media button to our chosen video platform.

[dslauson]

Well, and the funny thing is, our institution has Canvas Studio as our media platform, and it is still shifted into the LTI section.  So even their own platform is not given priority in the new RCE.