Recommended Tools and Methods for Using Audio and Video in Canvas

Using audio and video in a Canvas course can open the door to many possibilities, including multimedia discussion boards, recorded student presentations, using a flipped classroom model, and more. Still, instructors must make a number of choices regarding what tools to use and how to use them, from picking a webcam recorder to figuring out the best way to share videos in Canvas.

In this article you’ll find our recommendations on what tools and methods to use to support audio and video in your Canvas course, including:

  • Kaltura Capture, Kaltura webcam recorder, and Kaltura (My Media), the university’s supported solutions for recording, storing, and sharing media. Both tools are available to you and your students for free. We will also discuss the recording features in PowerPoint and how you turn your PowerPoints into lecture videos.
  • YouTube, Vimeo, and other third-party video platforms. Though the university doesn’t support these platforms, we will cover recommendations on how to embed or link to these sources.
  • PlayPosit, a powerful tool for making your audio and video content more interactive.

Recording Audio and Video

Kaltura Capture

When you or your students need to record audio or video content, Kaltura Capture will suit your needs in most instances. The app is simple to use and offers screen recording and webcam recording capability, making it an ideal tool for video lectures or prerecorded student presentations. After downloading and installing it on your device, you can use Kaltura Capture to:

  • Record the content on your computer screen. If you have a second monitor connected to your computer, you can choose which display to record.
  • Record video of yourself with your computer’s built-in or external webcam.
  • Record audio of yourself speaking with your computer’s built-in or external microphone.
  • On Windows, you can also record the audio from your computer system, such as when playing a video during a screen recording. (You must enable this feature in the application settings first.)

Kaltura Webcam Recorder

If you don’t need Kaltura Capture’s screen recording features, you can use Kaltura webcam recorder to record audio and video of yourself instead. It can be launched from your browser without downloading any software. Simply open the app from My Media in Canvas or within the Rich Content Editor while editing a Canvas page, discussion, assignment, quiz, or announcement. The webcam recorder is a quick and easy option for providing video feedback or recording a video introduction for a discussion board.

The "Kaltura" button in the Canvas Rich Content Editor, along with the "Add New" media dropdown menu
To launch the webcam recorder while editing an item in Canvas, click on the Kaltura icon (rainbow flower) in the toolbar of the Rich Content Editor. In the pop-up menu, click the “Add New” button and select “Webcam Recorder” from the dropdown menu.

Microsoft PowerPoint

If you already use PowerPoint to develop your lecture materials, consider using its built-in audio and video recording capabilities to create your pre-recorded lecture videos. Audio narrations can be recorded within PowerPoint slide by slide. Additionally, you can enable your webcam and record video footage of yourself during your narrations. To make your presentations mobile-friendly and more accessible, we recommend exporting your narrated PowerPoints as video files (guide for Mac users and guide for Windows users), uploading them to Kaltura (My Media), and then embedding the videos in Canvas. This LinkedIn Learning video is a great resource for getting started with recording narrations in PowerPoint.

Other Tools for Recording Audio and Video

Kaltura Capture and the Kaltura webcam recorder are not the only means of recording audio and video out there, and they may not work for every situation. You are welcome to explore other recording software, but know that if you use a tool that is not provided by the university, it also means that you will be on your own in terms of finding support if you need help.

It’s worth mentioning that there is one recording method we would discourage instructors from using: the “Record/Upload Media” option in the Rich Content Editor. First, Canvas has a limit on file size for media recorded with this feature. And second, captions (both machine-generated and professional) cannot be added to recordings made with this tool. To maximize accessibility and save yourself a potential headache, use a different recording software and store your recordings in Kaltura.

Storing and Sharing Your Media

Kaltura (My Media)

Whether you choose to record with Kaltura Capture or another application, we highly recommend uploading your recordings to Kaltura. One of the biggest advantages is that Kaltura provides unlimited long-term cloud video and audio storage at no additional cost. Once an audio or video file is in Kaltura, it is also incredibly easy to add a link to the media file or embed it anywhere in a Canvas course.

Kaltura makes it easy to manage your media as well. You can apply tags and add descriptions to help organize your content, sort and filter by a variety of attributes, and even make simple edits to your media with the Kaltura video editor, such as trimming out unwanted sections at the beginning or end of a screen capture recording.

The Kaltura video editor as it appears in Canvas
The Kaltura video editor is great for when you need to cut out sections of a video clip, trim the beginning or end of a clip, or create a short clip from a longer video.

Using Kaltura is also best practice for accessibility. When you upload your media, machine-generated English captions are automatically applied. When a student makes a formal disability accommodation request for captions through Student Accessibility Services, professional captions can be easily ordered and applied to your Kaltura media as well.

Quick Tip: Uploading Media from a Smartphone to Kaltura

What do you do if you want to have students create audio or video content, but they don’t all have access to a computer with a webcam? Fortunately, an Apple or Android smartphone can do the trick in these situations. First, students can record their media with the camera application on their phone. To upload a recording from your phone to Kaltura, download the Kaltura MediaSpace GO application for iOS or Android and then follow the instructions in the linked knowledgebase guide to configure the app’s setup. Once the app is configured, you can upload to Kaltura (My Media) in just a few taps. See the iOS app user guide or the Android app user guide for more info.

Other Tools for Storing and Sharing Your Media

Since video and audio files can be large, it is best to pick a storage solution in which your videos are saved to a cloud or hosted on a website. YouTube, while not a technology supported by the university, is still an option that supports both share links and embed codes. If you are comfortable with using OneDrive, you can also store recordings in your UWGB OneDrive cloud and share links to those recordings, though there is not currently a supported method for embedding these recordings in Canvas.

Please note that it is not advisable to upload media to your Canvas course’s files area. Video and audio files will quickly take up your course’s limited file storage space. Using a cloud storage system for your media helps solve this issue, as media embedded from platforms like Kaltura or YouTube do not count against this quota.

The "files" tab in Canvas
The “Files” area in Canvas is good for storing documents and images that are linked or embedded in your course, however it is not ideal for larger files like audio and video.

Sharing Media from External Sources

For media that you do not own and that is hosted outside Kaltura, such as YouTube videos and TED Talks, you have a few options for sharing. Depending on the source, you might be able to search for and embed the content from within Canvas’s Rich Content Editor. For the rest, you can use an embed code or a simple hyperlink.

Canvas Integrations

Films on Demand, TED-Ed, Vimeo, and YouTube all have Canvas integrations that you can access from the Rich Content Editor. While editing a page or post, click on Apps (the plug icon) in the toolbar of the Rich Content Editor and then “View All” to select a tool. Use the tool’s interface to search for and embed your video.

The YouTube video search using the YouTube Canvas integration
The YouTube Canvas integration lets you search for and embed media from within the Canvas Rich Content Editor.

Embed Codes

If your video source is not listed above, check to see if there is an embed code available on the website where the media is hosted (often this will be an option when you click to “share” a video). If you have the embed code, you can add the media to a Canvas page, discussion, etc. by going to Insert > Embed in the Rich Content Editor and pasting the embed code.

Hyperlinks

If all else fails, you can add a hyperlink to the media using the Links button in the Rich Content Editor and then “External Links.” Make sure to give the hyperlink a descriptive name, rather than just pasting the whole URL on the page. This is not only best practice for accessibility, but it also helps contextualize the links before a student clicks on them.

Enhancing Audio and Video Activities

Want to bring your audio and video content to the next level? Tools like PlayPosit can help by adding interactions for students to engage with while they watch. PlayPosit bulbs can include content from Kaltura, YouTube, and Vimeo, so you can mix and match content you’ve created yourself with other videos you’ve found online. Adding a few simple interactions to a video takes just a few minutes of setup. You can learn more about this powerful media tool in this PlayPosit overview guide and guide on potential PlayPosit use cases.

Questions?

Using audio and video in a course can seem intimidating at first, but with the right tools and training, it can also be harnessed for effective teaching. As always, we also welcome you to request a CATL consultation if you’d like to learn more about developing learning materials or activities with audio and video. As you explore your media options, you may also find the resources below useful.

 

Top 10 Technology Tips & Time-Savers

In an effort to help instructors in their work, CATL brainstormed some of the best technology time-savers and tips we have to share with you. Here’s our “Top 10” list. We encourage you to save it for future reference and use.

  1. Have end-of-semester questions about Canvas, such as how to send grades to SIS or give a student extended access to a course for an Incomplete? Consult our End-of-Semester Canvas Survival Guide for answers to these and other frequently asked questions.
  2. Work smarter and not harder by copying over your Canvas materials the next time you teach a course. Besides doing a full course import, did you know that you can also quickly copy a single module or module item to another course or share one with another instructor? You can even reuse imported course announcements by using the delay posting option to schedule them to post at a future date and time.
  3. Speed up your grading and boost transparency by setting up rubrics in Canvas. Once you’ve added a rubric to an assignment or a graded discussion and checked the box to use it for grading, Canvas will calculate the point total automatically when you use it to grade. Plus, rubrics can also be directly tied to your course’s outcomes in Canvas.
  4. Encourage or re-engage specific groups of students using the analytics and inbox features. Check out the weekly student activity trend data available in New Analytics to see which students may need a little prodding or use the “message students who” feature in the Canvas gradebook to give reminders and/or praise for an assignment.
  5. Want to fine tune the pacing of your course? You can add requirements to a module to force students to work through its contents in order. Once you have requirements set up, prerequisites can also be added which require a student to meet the requirements of a previous module before accessing the next.
  6. Consider using Kaltura (My Media) for the most streamlined audio/video experience in Canvas. You can upload and store your audio and video files in Kaltura, which has much greater storage capacity than many other options, and then easily embed your media in Canvas or provide a share link.
  7. Even if you’ve used Kaltura Capture before, you may not be familiar with all the different options for recording, such as the ability to choose a source for each output and toggle your webcam, screen recording, and audio on/off. In Windows, you can even enable system audio to capture audio from videos playing on your computer.
  8. With PlayPosit, you can enhance course videos in minutes by adding interactions for learners to engage with, such as polls or free-response questions. If you create a graded bulb, students’ grades also sync with Canvas automatically.
  9. If you are using Zoom for synchronous online classes or office hours, remember that you can schedule meetings through the Canvas Zoom integration. If you record your meetings, you can also publish these recordings for students to access in Canvas through the Zoom integration.
  10. If you’re looking for ways to add more engagement to your synchronous online lectures, try preparing in-class quizzes or polls for your Zoom meetings. Polls and quizzes can be added to Zoom meetings through the Zoom web portal and then pushed out to students during the meeting. Want to try something similar in an in-person class? Consider exploring PlayPosit’s Broadcast feature.

End-of-Semester Canvas Survival Guide

We know instructors and students are both tired at this point in the semester. We at CATL want to provide as much help and support as we can as you work to finish up both teaching and grading. One thing we can offer is a list of resources about Canvas that may make the grading process a bit easier or even show you things that you didn’t know you could do. Click on one of the suggestions below to expand the accordion and see the related guides.

Quizzes and Assignments

Assigning Alternate Assignment Due Dates to Specific Students – Do you need to grant an extension on an assignment or quiz to a specific student or students? This guide shows you how to set up alternate student-specific due dates and availability dates.

Using Quiz Moderation (Classic Quizzes) - Are you giving a final exam in Canvas? This guide explains how to use the quiz moderation page to view student attempts, grant additional time to a specific student, and allow additional attempts for a specific student. 

Using Quiz Moderation (New Quizzes) - Have you already made the switch to using “New Quizzes” in Canvas? Use this guide to learn about the New Quizzes moderation page to view attempts and allow additional time or attempts to individual students. 

Regrading Quiz Questions (Classic Quizzes) - If you find an issue with a multiple choice, true/false, or multiple answer quiz question after students have taken a quiz, this guide explains how you can use the regrade option to change a question’s correct answer and automatically award points for the question to some or all students. 

Regrading Quiz Questions (New Quizzes) - If you’ve already made the switch to using “New Quizzes” in Canvas, this guide explains the regrade options in the new tool. 

Finalizing Grades 

Create Grade Columns for Non-Submission Assignments - Non-submission assignments are useful for providing grades for work outside of Canvas. Creating a non-submission assignment adds a column to the Canvas gradebook for you to enter these grades. 

Awarding Extra Credit in Canvas - Canvas has a few methods for handling extra credit. You might award “bonus” points by creating an assignment worth 0 points, or by adding extra points to a regular assignment or quiz in SpeedGrader, for example. 

Total Grade Calculation with Missing Assignments – This guide explains how Canvas calculates final grades and the importance of regularly entering zeroes for missing work in the Canvas gradebook.

Sending Final Grades to SIS - This guide explains how to use the time-saving grade sync feature that allows you to quickly send final grades from Canvas to SIS. 

Student Course Access 

Course Dates and Access FAQ and Information - Read this guide to learn about how term dates and course dates work in Canvas and how you can allow or restrict your students’ ability to view the Canvas course after its conclusion. 

Extend Student Access Tool - Do you have a student taking an “Incomplete” in your course? This guide shows you how to use the “Extend Student Access” tool to give an individual student more time to access and finish work in the Canvas course. 

Other Canvas Tips

Using "Undelete" to Recover Deleted Items - If you accidentally deleted something in your course while cleaning it up and need to get it back, this guide explains how to access your course’s “undelete” page to restore deleted content. 

Where to Get Help 

You can get 24/7 support from Canvas by live chat, phone, or email by clicking the “Help” button in the Canvas global navigation menu bar on the left side of any page in Canvas. 

As always, CATL is also here to help you design your course, set up your assignments, and work through the process of grading. Fill out our consultation request form to schedule a meeting with a member of the CATL team.

Using Zoom for Office Hours

Whether your course is held completely online, face-to-face, or somewhere in between, offering your students the opportunity to meet for office hours remotely rather than just in person is a great way to offer additional flexibility and help meet your students’ needs. With its robust Canvas integration, Zoom is a solid choice for virtual office hours. Using Zoom for office hours is mostly the same as setting up a meeting for a virtual class session, though there are a few additional options you may wish to consider. 

Enabling the Waiting Room 

For office hours, we highly suggest enabling the waiting room in your meeting settings. When the waiting room is enabled, it means that each attendee will have to be manually let into the Zoom meeting by you, the host. This gives you more control of who joins the call and when, and you can prevent a student from “popping in” and accidentally intruding on a private meeting. 

Security options for Zoom meetings
The waiting room is one of the options you can select in the “Security” section of your meeting settings. You can require both a passcode and the waiting room, if you desire.

Setting Up a Recurrence 

If you have office hours at the same time each day and each week, you can set up a recurring meeting just like you would for virtual sessions. Let’s say you have office hours from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You would set your recurrence to “weekly”, check Tuesday and Thursday, set the start time as 11 a.m., and set the duration to two hours. The start and end dates of the recurrence would be the first and last days of the semester. When you set up your office hours through the Zoom Canvas integration, this will also populate the Canvas calendar with these meeting times. 

"When", "duration" and "time zone" settings for Zoom meetings; the meeting is set to start at 11 a.m. for a duration of 2 hours. Recurrence is checked and set to "weekly", with Tuesdays and Thursdays checked. The end date is set to May 9, 2022.
Sample office hour recurrence settings based on the scenario described above.

But what if your office hours don’t occur during the same time slot each day, such as 8 to 10 a.m. on Mondays and 1 to 3 p.m. on Thursdays? You could set up two recurring meetings, one for Mondays and one for Thursdays. In this case, you will want to make sure your two meeting links are clearly labeled with the day of the week so students don’t mix them up. You could also set up a single recurring meeting and ignore the fact that the meeting time for one of the two days is incorrect—the link will still work outside of the designated time slot, but it does mean that it will also list the incorrect time on the Canvas calendar and in Zoom. 

In these cases, another solution is to create a recurring meeting with “no fixed time”, which can be set from the “recurrence” dropdown menu when adjusting your meeting’s settings. This will create an open-ended meeting link that won’t expire for 365 days. Note that “no fixed time” meetings will not show up on the calendar in Canvas, though you could still manually add your office hours to the Canvas calendar and your Outlook calendar. 

The "recurring meeting" box is check in the Zoom settings and the recurrence dropdown is set to "no fixed time"
Recurrence settings can be managed under the “Time Zone” section of your meeting settings in the Zoom Canvas integration.

Questions? 

For most technical questions, please contact Zoom support or the GBIT Service Desk. If your questions pertain to the Zoom Canvas integration, your best point of contact is dle@uwgb.edu. Lastly, if you have general questions about how you can use Zoom to support your teaching, we always welcome you to email the CATL inbox (catl@uwgb.edu) or schedule a consultation with a CATL member.

Your Course Communication Strategy

Communicating is paramount in any course—this is especially true at a distance where even incidental contact is absent. Good communication correlates strongly with positive student feedback. The materials and content in your course could be entirely mute if students don’t know fully how you expect they interact with them.

You will want when and how you communicate with students to be authentic to you and your course. Much as you want the materials and activities of a course to align with your course objectives, you want how you communicate to align with you.

Decide what’s right for you…

Take a moment to consider what communication strategy is most authentic to you.

For now, think of this in general terms what is your “style” of communication? Are you a better listener or informer? Do you prefer one-on-one conversation or group-think? Can you be more often found waiting for others to pose questions or proactively providing answers?

Consider what you’ll need to communicate, to whom, how, and when.

As one example: I need to provide the instructions for lab and safety information to each section. The instructions need to be transparent because the sections will be at different places in the text. The safety information has to match the language in the safety manual. Students need to have received and comprehend this information at least a week before lab.

Consider what method you would follow to communicate with your students about these materials. Put another way: What would you like communication to look like in this course?

One method you may use for deciding on communication tools is the “SAMR” (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition) model.

Finally (and this is the step that’s easy to forget), look again at your workload and consider your teaching style. As an example, do you have final papers due in four different courses in the same week? You’ll want to make sure you have the capacity to be true to your own teaching. If you’re the sort of person who would like to do one-on-one conferences leading up to the final paper, that’s something to take into account.

In summary:

  • Consider what is authentic
  • Consider what is realistic
  • You may wish to use the SAMR model as a way of approaching this problem
  • But remember to keep your workload in mind

… then, match that to the tools available.

Return to the SAMR model or another means of reflecting on your decision as needed. Consider these options (and a few of their trade-offs) for communicating with students:

Benefits

  • A "distribution list" will allow you to send a message to your entire class at once.
  • Familiar to you and to students.

Trade-Offs

  • One-on-one communication can get "noisy" and relies on the class list in SIS or Canvas (not Outlook).
  • Media limited.

Benefits

  • Engage the whole class or specific groups of students.
  • Keep related things together.
  • Familiar in principle to students.
  • Less formal.

Trade-Offs

  • Requires regular/frequent interaction for best results.
  • Small learning curve in Canvas initially.
  • Task needs clarification.
  • Less formal.

Benefits

  • Intuitive and in Canvas.
  • Alert the whole class or sections of students all at once.
  • Allows for rich media (video messages, images, etc.)
  • Students get notified.
  • Allows for student comments (optional).

Trade-Offs

  • Students can disable email notifications—but still see announcements when in Canvas.
  • Can get noisy with frequent use.

(E.g., Zoom or Teams)

Benefits

  • Feels more like being in the classroom.
  • Sessions can be recorded for review (or those who miss).
  • Varying levels of interactive options (whiteboard, breakout groups, chat, polls, etc.)

Trade-Offs

  • Steeper learning curve the first time.
  • Relies on a good connection and technology.
  • Logistically, some students cannot make it to synchronous sessions.

Benefits

  • Intuitive and familiar to students.
  • Easy to use.
  • Synchronous.
  • A "history" of the chat is available to the entire class making it good for Q&A-type sessions.

Trade-Offs

  • Synchronous.
  • Whole-class only. Cannot be limited to specific students.

Benefits

  • Displays course due dates automatically
  • Can add other items (like reminders)

Trade-Offs

  • Requires "due dates"
  • Only the names of events appear directly on the calendar

Benefits

  • Create blocks of time for students to sign up to meet one-on-one (e.g. office hours)
  • Can use a "feed" to add these blocks to Outlook

Trade-Offs

  • Required additional communication so students know how and to use them.

Finally, let students know.

Make the necessary preparations for your selected technologies and techniques. All the while, be sure to keep your course information updated. At the minimum, you will want to let students know which tools you’ll be using, for what, when, and how to get support if they need it.

Example: I will be posting twice-weekly announcements in Canvas to help you stay on task and remind you of upcoming due dates. I ask that you reply to these announcements with questions you may have so we can clarify any sticking points as a class. I will reply to announcement comments the next day at the latest. If you need any help with the announcements tool in Canvas, Canvas support can be reached through any of the contact methods in the syllabus.

It is a good idea to have a dedicated Communication Policies page or outlining this information in your syllabus to let students know how and when you will be communicating with them—and how, when, and what they should communicate with you!