Heads up, Studio Admins! Access Video Libraries Without Acting as a User!

[AkosFarago]

In March, we rolled out a new Media Management interface for Administrators, the first phase of our journey that re-designs the video management experience in Studio. The plan follows as:

Phase	Value	Release Date	Supported Users
1	Provide Administrators with a new interface to search for courses, users and media across the entire account	2024-03-11	LMS Admins
2	Introduce quick and easy access to teachers’ and students’ Studio libraries	2024-08-07	LMS Admins
3	Enable sub-account Administrators to manage their sub-account’s media	2024-08-07	Sub-Account Admins
4	Modernize Studio Library for everyone	2024 Q4	Admins, Teachers, Students
5	Add common video management capabilities: recycle bin, favorite media or retaining content etc	2024 Q4	Admins, Teachers, Students

We have just rolled out the next phase: quickly accessing and managing other users’ video libraries. Let me walk you through the updates and how it will save you significant time and effort when managing other video libraries. In addition to that, sub-account Admin access also rolled out, I will cover what it means for you if you are a sub-account Admin in a separate blog post.

The option to access others’ Libraries is accessible under the Users tab in the new Admin Media Management interface. Search for the first user that comes to your mind and click on either the name or the View Library in the menu. It’s going to open a new browser tab, let's dive into it.

The New Studio Library - Manage Others’ Libraries Without Masquerading!
The Library - aka the landing page of Studio - has been more or less the same for several years. We kept it simple and easy to use, but we frequently ran into design concerns when we chatted about common video management needs such as pinning videos, restoring deleted content or drag’n’drop media to collections.

We needed an overhaul to make sure that adding these new capabilities won’t transform it into something unnecessarily complicated in the future, but we also wanted to keep the simplicity of the previous layout. You might already notice some major changes, so let’s take a closer look at them!

1. The goal for Admins is that they no longer need to masquerade as a user in Canvas, they can directly manage others’ Libraries without leaving Studio, saving TONS of clicks in this process.
2. This view is only accessible for root Admins who want quick access to others’ video libraries; however, the My Library will also be replaced by this view later this year. In the following months, we will collect feedback on the new layout, incorporate the most valuable ones and then release this for everyone.
3. Collections are now moved and separated to the left, similarly to a folder structure in most file/video management applications. This way you can access and manage own and shared content from the same place, and it will provide a streamlined way to manage pinned and deleted videos later this year. Additionally, the separated collection/video layout will prepare us to implement drag’n’drop and introduce sub-collections later down the road!
4. Bulk actions are introduced, you will be able to bulk move, tag and delete media. 
5. Besides the current Grid View of the Library, we introduced a List View for a more compact experience if that is preferred. On Aug 7, only the List View will be available, the Grid View will come in the upcoming weeks latest in September.
6. Uploading or creating content on behalf of the user is fully supported, the owner of the video will be the person whose Library is being accessed. However, manipulating content such as editing videos, adding quizzes or annotations are not yet available.
7. The user’s Library opens in a new browser tab that will support you to quickly manage multiple Libraries at once if it’s necessary. This was an intentional design decision, so you don’t have to always go back to the Media Management interface, and any search or filter you may apply will remain active.
   
   

Inactive users
Going back to the Media Management interface, we also added a new option to filter for Inactive users. This is going to help you identify those users who have not logged in to their account in a year, or they have never used Studio (not even watched a Studio video in any Canvas course). While this will help you find content from inactive users and manage storage, it will introduce substantial improvement into our next topic - Studio Analytics.

Roadmap update
The outcome that supports Studio Administrators to gain a clearer understanding of faculty's video content usage is now moved to the first quarter of 2025 from this year. That will make Studio Analytics more accurate, and change it to show content from only active users. Together with the new Admin Media Management interface and the upcoming access to users’ Studio Libraries, it will be a powerful tool to get an understanding on the active Studio users and how much total storage inactive ones make up. 

That’s only half of our updates for the beginning of back to school and I can’t wait to share with you all the updates on supporting sub-accounts in Studio. In the meantime, let me know if you have any questions!

Best,
Akos

[dbrace]

This is great, @AkosFarago! Thank you!

A few comments and questions:

1. When I am looking at a list of users from "Admin > Media Management > Users", most of our high-use users (by storage and content) are labeled as "Inactive" and they are mostly active faculty.  Is this a "bug" or am I not understanding the criteria used to make that determination?  Should I report it through Canvas Support channels?
2. When navigating to Canvas Studio as my admin account from the left-side global navigation button in Canvas LMS (I have not tried from *.instructuremedia.com), when I click on the "three dots" icon on the right-side and then "View Library", the library does not load in a new tab.  I believe you said that it would.  Is this a "bug"?  Should I report this through Canvas Support channels?
3. Is there a way for Canvas LMS and Canvas Studio admins to remove previously accessed course collections (because they access a course) from their "Course Collections > All Collections" page.  My institution has only been a full Canvas Studio subscriber for a few years but Canvas Studio admin account has 6 pages of course collections with 20 collections on each page (the last page has only 6) and this is from my Canvas LMS admin user account going into courses to help faculty and students.

My other comment is something that I have brought up in the past (which you acknowledged and did reply back to, I tried to find it but could not) about Canvas Studio enhancements.  At Canvas Releases (https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Releases/tkb-p/canvas-release), why are we not being notified ahead-of-time about Canvas Studio and on a regular (mostly predictable) schedule like other Instructure platforms have?

[AkosFarago]

Hi  @dbrace,

Thank you for the feedback.

1. There was a small bug that we have fixed this morning. Let me know if you are still seeing too many Inactive tags!
2. That's a great catch and the change is already on the way. We expect to have the new tab fix on production in 1 or 2 weeks.
3. Mixing course collections for actually enrolling in a course and giving a helping hand for faculty/students is not fortunate indeed and we have it on our radar to clean up course collections at other places as well. At the moment, there is no tool for the removal.

With regards to the release page, I fully agree that Studio for the past few months was not predictable, and notes were published late - similarly to this addition. Timing of these releases were super unfortunate recently, we also changed from Monday to Wednesday production deployments and it has not been synced with the documentation updates appropriately. Rest assured, we are going to do everything to change this from now on to make sure it won't happen with our next ones. I really appreciate the call out on this.

Best,

Akos

[dbrace]

You are welcome, @AkosFarago.

Thank you for addressing #1. After a quick look by sorting by both "Storage" and "Studio Content" and their first five pages (out of 267), the "Inactive" tag seems to be as accurate as I would have expected.

For #2, thank you for putting that into the pipeline for being resolved.  I was able to right-click on the name of the user (from the left-side) and select "Open Link in New Tab".  Please do not remove that while resolving having it do it automatically.

For #3, I hope that this happens sooner rather than latera and that it is addressed by either (a) not having them appear at all in the "Course Collections > All Collections" page for Canvas LMS admins and Canvas Studio admins or (b) providing Canvas LMS admins and Canvas Studio admins with the ability to remove a course collection from the "Course Collections > All Collections" page.

I really do appreciate you doing everything that you can about including Canvas Studio releases at https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Releases/tkb-p/canvas-release.  Doing this will help admins/users to be on a regular cadence for Canvas Studio updates and hold Instructure (Canvas Studio) accountable for providing admins/users with notice(s) a few weeks in advance (instead of on the day it has been released or afterwards).

Thank you again for everything that you and your team are doing.

Doug

[RachelSalmon]

Hello @AkosFarago,

We have a larger number of admin with very very few permissions due to an external tool (Dropout Detective) for our advisors. Because they are admin at the root account level, they are automatically Studio Admin. We didn't have issues with them having access to anyone else's library because they were not allowed to masquerade as anyone else. However, with this change, now we have a number of faculty who have access to anyone's Studio library when we do not want that to be the case. I know that the admin role in Canvas will trigger the admin in Studio which is understandable for most instances. We figured we would remove their admin access manually but we had a couple issues with this. 1) When we remove their admin access, as soon as they re-access Studio, their admin rights return and 2) We cannot filter Studio users by admin access making it tedious to manually remove their access. 

Can it be adjusted so that removing Studio admin access sticks or a way to disable the connection between admin access in Canvas and Studio, and then allow for the ability to filter Studio users with admin access?

This would be a huge help since we have already had faculty reach out about why they can now see everyone's library and them worrying about other people having access to theirs. 

Thank you!

[AkosFarago]

@RachelSalmon,

Yes, we can turn off the sync between Canvas and Studio anytime, so that LMS root admins are not promoted automatically to Studio admins. We also introduced the Studio Admin filter to Admin Media Management, that you will be able to leverage to manually add/remove the Studio Admin role to users (since they are no longer synced)

I'll talk to Customer Success Manager tomorrow about this very concern and they will reach out on the next steps!

Best,

Akos

[RachelSalmon]

@AkosFarago Thank you so much for your response and adding the ability to filter. That really helps as well as the ability to turn off the sync. I'll keep my eye out for the communication from our CSM. Have a great day!

[dtod]

Is the sync something we have to ask for? I added a sub-account admin as a Studio sub-account admin and nothing changed for them. They do not have access to media management at all.

With that said, we'd have the same issue with many users with very limited root level admin roles. Ideally, there'd be a Canvas-side account permission.

Also, the user search is weird (in the same way that Commons user searches are weird). I can't search by email and always get unrelated results, e.g. if I search for "John Smith" I get John, Jason, George, Riley, with a variety of last names too, and not in alphabetical order. It appears to be doing a boolean ("John" and "Smith" with some other random bits thrown in).

[AkosFarago]

Hi @dtod, 

The Admin must be a sub-account Admin in Canvas, Studio inherits that role automatically. You don't have to separately set it in Studio as it will just elevate the access of certain data in the Media Management interface. Are you sure that the user holds a sub-account Admin role in a Canvas sub-account?

We would love to better understand the same issue with very limited too level admin roles, so probably better to have a separate chat on that. We do have plans to continuously improve on the Media Management interface, so feedback is highly appreciated!

We also identified the strange behaviour on the user search that the team is already looking into right now. Let me get back to you here when we have the fix for that.

Thank you!

[dtod]

Thanks for the quick response, @AkosFarago. I do have a ticket open.

Are you sure that the user holds a sub-account Admin role in a Canvas sub-account?

Absolutely sure.

We would love to better understand the same issue with very limited too level admin roles, so probably better to have a separate chat on that.

We have a specific sub-account role that is almost, but not quite, Account Admin for our colleges. Access to that role is tightly controlled. People who have that role are also granted the Act As... permission at the top level, because that's the only place it works, and the users that they may be investigating/helping may not (yet) be affiliated to their sub-account.

[dbrace]

@AkosFarago, when a Canvas LMS and Canvas Studio admin is using the new "Admin > Media Managment > Users" feature in Canvas Studio and viewing a user account's Canvas Studio Library, is the admin supposed to be able to see regular collections and course collections or only regular collections?

[AkosFarago]

Hi @dbrace,

That is a good call out! We are currently working on the remaining improvements around the new Studio library experience before we would make it available to everyone and those include access to the course collections as well.