Flip Sunsets Canvas Integration? Discussions and Studio are Here to Save You!

[AkosFarago]

Flipgrid has long been a favorite video discussion platform integrated into Canvas, enhancing student engagement through interactive discussion boards and assignments. However, with Flipgrid sunsetting its Canvas integration on July 1 and transitioning exclusively to MS Teams, educators need a robust alternative to maintain this level of engagement. Let me show you how you can leverage Studio for the same purpose with our new Capture solution released earlier this year.

Flipgrid flips out of Canvas on July 1st
Studio Capture is our native webcam and screen capture tool that not only generates captions automatically but also provides video and caption editing capabilities. Accessible anywhere in Canvas with the RCE - including Assignments and Discussions - Studio Capture makes it an easy substitute for Flip Assignments. Moreover, the screen recording piece will be added to the Speedgrader in July which creates an even more engaging atmosphere when communicating with students privately.

Flip Assignments

Let’s break down the Flip experience in Canvas into three pillars and recreate the experience

1. Creating a Flip Assignment: Set up an assignment in Canvas as a Flip Discussion board.
2. Student Replies: Students submit video responses from anywhere, anytime.
3. Grading Interactions: Access and grade student interactions in SpeedGrader.
   
   

Create a Flip Assignment

For a video discussion, you will start with creating a regular Discussion in Canvas. If you want video replies from students showing up in the Speedgrader automatically, make sure the Graded checkbox is selected. Flipgrid’s topic resource is widely used to enrich the discussion topic with media, with a recording on the fly, an uploaded video from your computer or an embedded video from Youtube or Vimeo. Those options are all supported with Studio in Discussions! In addition to that, videos added as topic resources land in your Studio library, so you can re-use them in other discussions and courses.

Studio is seamlessly integrated into Canvas Discussions for teachers and students

Videos as Topic Resources are saved into your Studio Library

Student Replies

Students have the same RCE as teachers, allowing them to record or upload videos directly in their replies. These videos appear under the discussion post, are automatically captioned, and saved in the student’s Studio library for future reference. Additionally, students can create screen recordings with Studio Capture, providing flexibility in how they present their responses.

Students can take full advantage of the new webcam and screen recorder

Discussion board post with students posting different replies recorded with Studio

Grading Interactions

A key aspect of Flipgrid is its integration with SpeedGrader. With Studio Capture, student reply videos are automatically added to SpeedGrader, allowing teachers to quickly grade and provide feedback. Studio enhances this experience: the upcoming Canvas release in June will include screen recording and auto-captioning directly within SpeedGrader, providing teachers with the necessary video tools to share private, accessible feedback on discussion board posts.

Video replies are automatically sent to the Speedgrader for grading and further private feedback

The screen recorder option in the Speedgrader can already be tested on Canvas Beta - find the camera icon with “NEW” right under the comment box!

Upcoming enhancements

We have three enhancements on our immediate roadmap strongly related to this:

• Auto-publishing captions: Currently, while Studio generates captions automatically, they must be manually reviewed and published. By the end of the month, an optional auto-publish mode will be introduced, making video discussion replies accessible immediately upon upload.
• Open Studio in a wider dialog in Canvas: You may also notice a wider Studio dialog in the first image to make browsing and recording videos in Canvas easier and more accessible, something we plan to roll out during summer.
• Disable Media Tabs in discussion replies: while the media tabs can be anytime enabled and disable during submitting a video reply, it will greatly help if there was a separate control for embedding in Discussions

Feel free to share about your Flip experience in the comments and let's continue to explore how we can assist you with this transition!

Akos

[juliejohnson]

Thanks for addressing the Flip/Flipgrid issue. 

I read the entire blogpost and I don't see a breakdown of what is available in the free version vs the paid version of Studio. @AkosFarago could you break those differences down?

Thank you! Currently trying to figure out a replacement for Flip to suggest to faculty and need to know what works with the free version of Studio in the RCE.

[aolsonpacheco]

Thank, you @AkosFarago ! Our team thoroughly enjoyed meeting with you last month, and we are impressed with how receptive you have been to our feedback. Thank you for all you are doing to improve Studio! 👏🏽👏🏽

It was very disappointing to learn that Flip's free Canvas integration will no longer be available. Flip has been an integral tool for humanizing online learning at our college and many other California Community Colleges. 

Although our institution has been licensing and using Studio heavily since 2019, we have chosen NOT to use Studio for video discussions in the past. This is because we have not been able to get Studio to work on mobile for discussions. For Studio to be a viable replacement, it needs to work well on mobile in the Canvas Student App. Most students (and many faculty) rely on their phones for cameras and microphones. Making Studio work well on mobile will not only reach more students, but it will especially reach those with fewer resources. It is an equity issue. And to be fair, Flip did not work perfectly on mobile. Hopefully a native tool in Canvas will! 

Another equity issue that Studio seems to be tackling well is making captions easier to publish (e.g. auto-publishing auto-generated captions, and allowing for editing). This is a HUGE reason why we liked Flip. Excited to see this enhancement come at the end of the month!  

[themidiman]

I'm currently exploring other options for Flip.com replacement. I had recommended Studio to one of our star Flip.com faculty users at our college who uses videos with a storytelling course, and with the transition of Canvas Discussions enhancements also happening relatively at the same time, it's not a 100% smooth transition. I was playing with the idea of this with her and we noticed a few things:

• Flip made the discussion with 100% all video responses, whereas Canvas discussions allowed for text to be intermixed with embedded video. While that's okay, the ability to emphasize the video as being the main star of the student responses is paramount.
• The embed with media tabs option is on by default. Students who are new to studio may not realize that this embeds an interface with the ability to comment at specific time stamps in the video making it difficult to find where the new response should go.
• The discussion enhancement sorting is still not 100% baked yet and we found it difficult to have to scroll and find the history of nested video response posts. Replies within a certain threshold don't display without a few additional mouse clicks and when they are exposed, the user experience is still rather kludgy to figure out where to post your new recording.
• Video processing/render time for 5 minute videos (the minimum required length) is noticeably slower than Flip

If Canvas studio had more of the 1:1 features as far as the learner experience of Flip this would be great. But for now we're exploring Padlet as an alternative.

[aolsonpacheco]

@themidiman  Thanks for the insights. It looks like from Akos's above post that the second issue (media tabs) will be resolved with an upcoming enhancement: 

• Disable Media Tabs in discussion replies: while the media tabs can be anytime enabled and disable during submitting a video reply, it will greatly help if there was a separate control for embedding in Discussions.

For the time being, our institution has disabled media tabs at the account level. However, anyone can select enable upon embed. See "Admin Settings to Enable or Disable Media Tab Defaults" from the 04/03/2023 release notes. 

Question: Regarding Padlet, how do you plan to address video captioning?

[themidiman]

@aolsonpacheco ,

We have American Sign Language courses using Canvas Studio where discussions with media tabs enabled by default is paramount. So if there were a way to do that disabling at the course level that would be a nice feature.

Also with respect to Padlet captions, we don't have a solution for that. We're very early in the exploration phase, so I will return to this to let everyone know about that after I know more.

[aolsonpacheco]

@themidiman What is the need for media tabs to be enabled for your ASL courses, to review/publish captions?

[themidiman]

@aolsonpacheco 

The ASL instructor wants to have the ability for course members (students and teacher) to give feedback on videos at certain time stamps. Automation for ASL Captions is a topic for future Studio enhancements because those are a category/language all of its own for accessibility reasons. For our needs we don't really need captions for ASL videos at this point because most of our ASL students fall into the category of learning it "as a second language" and not their primary one.

[aolsonpacheco]

Thank you @themidiman . That is an excellent use case for keeping the commenting tool enabled in discussions. 

[laura-harste]

I have a number of faculty who used FlipGrid to record videos for their courses and are concerned that they will lose these when FlipGrid sunsets.  Will these recordings still be available for posting?  If not, is there a way for them to convert the files to save for future use?  Apologies for all of the questions, but I have not personally used the program.  Just helping with the worries.

[themidiman]

@laura-harste ,

The Flip website has posted a guide for how to download videos that have been posted to their platform:

https://help.flip.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045748833-Download-your-videos

[laura-harste]

Thank you!

[dbrace]

just an observation @AkosFarago

Flip/Flipgrid is featured on the "Integrations" as a partner at https://www.instructure.com/higher-education

you might want to reach out to someone and have it/them removed

[themidiman]

I'm coming back to this thread as promised to disclose some information about Padlet as a prospective replacement for Flip. As of this post, the LTI 1.3 for Padlet currently doesn't support grade pass-back, but the Padlet rep we spoke to said this is something they are aware of feature parity issues with Flip and their platform and are interested in working on it. The instructor(s) we have currently using Flip need to be able to narrow down students posts and responses to just their own, and it's not clear just yet how this will be accomplished with Padlet.

As you might imagine, Padlet doesn't do any of this for free like Flip was doing before they announced they are migrating away from this model to MS Teams.

We were aware that Flip was free but how long was Microsoft's investment in offering Flip as a free educational resource going to last? In the world of ed tech, reality will eventually rear its head as someone still has to pay the bills. 

I'll be happy to post more information as we come closer to an official Padlet decision, but since this is an Instructure forum, Canvas Studio would be a great substitute if it also offered paying schools the option to mimic Flip 1:1 more closely as a pure video post/response platform. Canvas Studio being shoehorned into Canvas Discussions is a nice thought but not a 100% good replacement as of this writing. Maybe someday it will be different but for now it is not going to be serving our needs as a replacement for Flip.

[aolsonpacheco]

@themidiman You must be already aware, but I thought I would share this helpful resource my awesome colleague shared with me recently:

1. Padlet now has auto-captions for video posts. They cannot yet be edited, though. 
2. There is a tutorial on how to import Flip assignments into Padlet (import includes all videos). Helpful FAQ at the bottom. 
3. Padlet has also made some recent accessibility upgrades. 

[themidiman]

Thanks, @aolsonpacheco !