Auto-publishing captions
I was fortunate enough to fly to California and meet some institutions in May. These in-person visits add so much depth to the conversation and they provide lots of great input to problems that we’ve been researching recently. For instance, video quizzing, and how teachers want to leverage them to build student engagement with their videos. How students would react to teachers controlling the speed and locking the seeking in videos and its contradictory pedagogical value in self-paced learning environments. We also chatted about extending the native Studio editing tools and what it is that content creators truly use on a daily basis with other solutions. Using videos in Canvas Discussions, and students replying to their peers by recording themselves is a great way to enhance the learning process.
An important piece that we went into greater details is auto-publishing captions. You may have noticed that since Mar 25, captions are automatically generated, but they still need to be reviewed and published manually. That resulted in many of you reaching out to me that those should be also published automatically. Should they be?
The key takeaway is that there are two very vocal groups. One, who prefers simplicity and automation, says that every student must be provided with captions every time no matter if those are unreviewed yet and might have inaccuracies. The other group is also right: a full automation might make content creators neglect the review process more and more over time and fix inaccuracies when there is a complaint only, making auto-publishing a no-go. Things like reusing videos semester over semester, or the variable audio quality that impacts caption quality indeed require different processes in place. There is also the case when there is only one department at an institution that uses a different solution to create videos and captions, where this automation creates a far less than ideal user experience.
With all that feedback, we decided to introduce this control both on the account (Admin) and user level, somewhat similarly to Feature Options in case of courses. Stay tuned, this is coming in the following weeks!
The good ol' CC button
If we are already talking about captions, there might be one more interesting update, something that is much bigger than what it actually looks like at a glance. The icon for the caption toggle. Resulted in a long discussion several years back on why Studio uses no CC button, but a transcript-like icon. The past one year added tons of video accessibility improvements to Studio, captioning was frequently in the spotlight, and we believe this deserves a quick survey to see if we should make this change this time or not.
Minor change in the release schedule
First, we also noticed that due to some strange changes, the public roadmap does not contain any Studio related outcomes. Don’t worry, we are going to fix that very soon! Additionally, I wanted to inform all of you that Studio will move product updates to Wednesdays from Mondays starting on July 3, 2024.
And lastly, let me add a photo here with the wonderful Ventura CCD team! It was a such a great discussion!
Best,
Akos
