Including multimedia content in a Canvas course is a great way to engage students and allows them to watch and replay content at their own pace. However, lengthy videos can lose students’ interest.
To keep students engaged, make sure to chunk multimedia content into smaller segments. For example, instead of posting an hour-long lecture recording, separate the file into multiple smaller videos organized by sub-topics.
All faculty and staff have access to Panoptoand Zoom for video recording, editing, storage and embedding into Canvas. Many free apps are available for creating video and audio presentations such asScreencast-O-Matic for creating tutorial videos, adding audio over slideshows, webcam videos or audio files. Audacity.com is also recommended for recording just audio MP3 files. For reasons of privacy and accessibility, all recordings need to be uploaded into Panopto to allow for the most accurate closed captioning. When you record to the cloud in Zoom, your recording is automatically uploaded to your Panopto account for editing and embedding into your course. YouTube is not recommended for sharing instructor lectures. Please contact the ID Team for assistance.
Accessibility through video captioning
Even if you don’t have a student with hearing difficulties in your class, closed-captions can be quite helpful to other students. Students for whom English is not their primary language, students with certain cognitive challenges, and students watching your videos in noisy environments can all benefit by the addition of captioning.
Panopto automatically adds closed captioning for accessibility. The text is easily editable within the program and should be reviewed to reach 100% accuracy. If you have a strong accent, if there are multiple people in the video, or if you are in a field where the use of terms not commonly found in everyday conversation, you will need to review the captions and make corrections.