Sharing pre-recorded videos with your students through Canvas
Core recommended practice: Use Google Drive or YouTube to share your pre-recorded videos
Put videos that you want to share with your students on Google Drive or YouTube, and put the link in relevant places with in your Canvas course(s).
→ → To be clear, we are talking about videos-- which you own the rights to or have otherwise secured rights to-- that you wish to share asynchronously, not live synchronous meetings you're holding in Zoom or Google Meet (unless you record those and then want to share those recordings). ← ←
Both YouTube and GoogleDrive offer a rich set of features for your videos including captions, playlists, and unlimited storage for your videos, and more. We will be adding resources and how-to articles on using these two Google services, our current offerings are here.
But sometimes, you need to have the videos actually in Canvas...
In some cases, you need to get your videos to your students by uploading them directly to Canvas. The single reason at this time for doing this is for students who are studying from China. They cannot access Google services including YouTube, GoogleDrive, and WhitMail. Canvas can handle videos, but there are significant limitations, including file size and other storage limitations, and no captioning (Which is why using Google Services is the core recommended practice when possible). There are also things you need to do to your videos in order to successfully prepare and embed your videos into your Canvas course.
To embed videos into your Canvas course, please perform the following steps:
- Start here: Prepare your video for upload
- Compressing video files - ( Mac instructions ) ( Windows instructions )
- Break up your original video into separate pieces - ( Mac instructions ) ( Windows instructions )
- Upload your finished videos into Canvas, the right way ("embedding")
You may want to add captions to the videos you've uploaded to Canvas. Here are Instructure's (the company that makes Canvas) instructions on how to do this.