Canvas Studio F.A.Q.

Canvas Studio (formerly Arc Studio) is a Canvas tool that allows you to create basic screen or webcam (or both) recordings. Studio is great for creating welcome videos, announcements, and quick instructional videos. Studio and Zoom can both be used to create cloud recordings of lectures. Both have limited editing features, so they really do mimic the classroom experience (mistakes and all). Both have the ability to generate automatic captions that can be edited for accuracy (in English and a few other languages). What’s different is that the videos you create with Studio are hosted within Canvas, can be easily embedded in Canvas Page or Announcement, and the player has some pretty nifty tools that work well for asynchronous instruction. You can see how much (if any) of the video students watched, and students can comment on the video and ask questions that you can answer in a discussion-like setting.

It is possible to upload your Zoom recordings into Studio, but if you’re not planning to have students attend the Zoom sessions you record, you might as well just use Studio to begin with.

Canvas Studio can be added as an item on your Course Navigation menu. You’ll be able to see this, but students will not. (They’ll only see the videos where they’ve been added to a page or an announcement.)

To add Studio to your Course Navigation menu:

1. Click on Settings (bottom of Course Navigation menu)

2. Click on the Navigation tab at the top of the page

3. Locate Studio on the bottom list.

4. Click the three little dots, and select Enable

5. Studio should now appear in the top list. Drag and drop to the position you would like.

6. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save.

Its easy to use Studio and your webcam to record a quick announcement. Videos inside an announcement are not visible on the Canvas Student App, so be sure to include the important information in text form too.

The video you create can be embedded into your Announcement using the Rich Content Editor:

1. Open your Announcement for editing

2. From the Rich Content Editor toolbar, select the blue V icon (more external tools)

3. Select Canvas Studio from the drop-down list

4. Select the video you’d like to include from the gallery.

5. Decide whether you want to allow students to comment.

   • Note, including the comments feature takes up real estate in the announcement. It's a good idea to put the video at the bottom of the announcement if you want to include comments.

   • Also, if you enable comments, you’ll want to set up notifications

6. Click Embed

Studio can be used to film a narrated screen capture. If you usually lecture using a PowerPoint presentation in class, you can use this feature. Be advised, that videos under 10 minutes are much more likely to keep student’s attention in an online course. If your presentations are long, consider culling “just for fun” or “extra info” slides and filming a few short “mini-lectures” on the essential material. Allowing comments on mini-lectures is a great idea, as your students can comment on the video at the exact point they have a question.

How do I share Studio lectures with my students

The first option is to embed the video on a Canvas Page using the Rich Content Editor and include that page in the relevant Module.

Canvas Studio can generate automatic captions for several different languages. Depending on the length of your video, the automatic captions may be ready almost immediately, or may take several minutes to render. Once the captions are available, you can edit them for accuracy.

Studio Insights allows the instructor to see how much of the video each student watched. Instructors can also see how much of the video was watched on average. To see the analytics for a video:

1. Select Studio from the Course Navigation menu

2. Go to My Uploads

3. Select the video of interest

4. Select the Insights tab

Comments can be useful for instructional videos as they allow students to ask questions and communicate with each other. However, for video announcements they may not be necessary. The Comments box that sits below each Studio video is also rather large and can take up valuable real estate on a page. If you don’t feel that comments are necessary, you disable comments entirely. If you discover some inappropriate comments, you can delete them.

If you decide that you don’t want comments after you’ve already embedded the video in your page or announcement, Edit the page/announcement, delete the Studio video, and then embed again (this time toggling off the allow comments switch).