Hi @cpowell2 , This seems relatively recent, however I think that this tackles the problem at the wrong end.
My view would be that this needs to appear at the point where the 'offending' file is uploaded by the instructor.
Notwithstanding organisational decisions as to whether video should be in Canvas or a streaming repository, by and large most of my teaching colleagues are generating much larger higher quality files than is necessary.
I frequently see presentations of over 75MB (we quota 500MB per course) which, after compressing images, reduce to as little as 10MB. Generally this is because high quality images have been offloaded from internet, or loaded from high quality cameras - generally the quality is so good that you could project it on the side of a skyscraper without pixellating. Less than 5% of our Canvas Course sites genuinely require more than 500MB.
Why is this an issue ?
- Slow student download experience when travelling or in low speed village connections
- Quickly uses up local storage on older devices in the student device downloads area without effective housekeeping
- Increases institutional and community bandwidth requirements and costs (a sustainability issue)
- Increases the server farm capacity requirements (becoming a prominent issue)
In my experience even a larger powerpoint shouldn't need to be over 10MB, and by using the relevant 'compress images' tool and selecting email quality in Office etc, the Powerpoint remains of sufficient resolution for in class presentation and certainly for mobile and desktop viewing.
I would liek to see a warning (potentially locally configurable) at the point of file upload for both students and instructors; until then the Canvas Course Storage report helps spot high file size users, and its a question of educating the educators and getting them in turn to educate their students ....
