[Studio] Enabling Studio for Students to Access Course Videos

[mjones14]

With 100% remote teaching during the COVID pandemic, I and my colleagues are blending synchronous and asynchronous content. We are creating quite a few videos that we house in Studio and embed into Canvas modules in our courses. We find that students want to access a the repository of videos for their courses. They want a repository of videos in one place, without needing to remember which module contained the particular video of interest. I have done a workaround by creating a new module to house just the videos, and then embedding each video in the Module, a time-consuming process.

As a teacher in Studio, I can create Collections and view the videos all in one place, but students currently cannot access the videos housed in Studio. Can Studio and Canvas be updated to allow students to access designated Collections (or videos that have been embedded in the student's particular course)? For example, in an ordinary Canvas course, we can enable students to use Files to individually see folders and files outside of a particular module. It would be very helpful to teachers and students to have similar functionality for videos. Thank you for your consideration.

[viniciuslbar]

I recently started to use Canvas Studio in the course I'm teaching at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Sweden and I missed some features in Canvas Studio regarding content sharing.

As far as I know, it's possible to share videos/collections by typing the contact's names. Further, it's possible to share a public link for single videos or embed them (not collections though).

In the case of a large group of students, it's not practical to type student's names one by one. Thus, sharing a public link or embed the video is more practical.

I think it would be beneficial to be able to share a public link for collections, so students could have access to a "playlist" through a single link. Additionally, being able to embed a whole collection would also be great.

[greenengineer]

+1 sharing Video collections with courses would is a must feature.

[MalenaM]

I broke up a 20+ minute lesson into small videos, but I don't want to post 10 different videos on a single page. Does Canvas plan on adding a playlist option?

Also, are there any plans to add a transcript to the video player?

[jfountain]

We just started using Studio and find it very cumbersome for instructors to have to embed individual course videos on pages or modules for students to view them within a course.  All of our lectures are recorded, so it is time consuming to build them into the course this way.

It would be ideal for students to see the "Studio" link in the course navigation menu, and when they click that, they see all the videos that have been uploaded to that same course.

The instructor should have a way in Studio to tag their videos to that course so students can view them using the Studio course navigation link.

[jfountain]

Additionally, it is impractical for us to share a collection with our students enrolled in the course, as we have 470 students enrolled in a single course(s).

[otism]

I totally agree with @jfountain -- it would be great if the Studio link in the course navigation menu would appear for students, I've had a number of faculty ask me why the Studio link doesn't appear in student view.

[AkosFarago]

Hi all!

This seems to be a reasonable feature within Studio/Canvas, a course media collection for students is something that could be used for many different purposes. We'll work on improving the sharing experience next year and will consider this, especially the Studio link in the navigation menu sounds like a place where students would go naturally to watch media of a particular course.

I saved this thread for myself that once we are at doing our research, I'll post here to set up some Zoom calls with you to go into the issue further. Till then, thank you for your patience and doing the effort to use workarounds like separate pages/modules with all embedded media. We know it might be cumbersome - we'll very soon introduce group sharing capability to Studio, that might mitigate the effort for smaller course sizes. 

Best,

Akos

[nwilson7]

@AkosFarago any updates on this? 

We also use Panopto and this is how Panopto works when you add it to a Canvas course.  Panopto Recordings shows as a navigation menu item and then it creates a folder in the instructors Panopto account specifically for that course.  It also syncs all the users from that course so that there is no sharing involved.  Students just click the link and have access to all the course videos.  Of course the instructor can still embed or link them in all other areas of Canvas but it creates the one repository that is requested in this thread.

We just had an instructor assume that Studio would work the same way and now is left with sharing the 50ish videos with all the students which no mater how she does it, it is a pain staking process.

-Nick

[AkosFarago]

Hi Nick,

Thank you for following up this topic!

We haven't looked into it so far, but I'll make sure to include you in the discovery process when we start to dig ourselves into it. It is also a bit weird for me why the default LTI configuration does not let students access Studio from the course navigation.

Akos