Restricting video download and transcript download

[NajiDahi]

Hi all,

I upload my lectures to Canvas Studio. I want to be able to stop students from downloading the video or the transcript of the video. Since the advent of AI, I have noticed a steady increase in average grade in my courses. The average went from the mid 70s to the mid 80s since AI was launched. Students are simply taking our lectures/transcripts putting them in AI and generating the exam questions. I have tried that and it works. If I can do it, then they can do it. It is CHEATING plain and simple.

I place each lecture in a new page. I have found a workaround to restrict the video download by using the share media function in Canvas Studio as shown in the first screenshot. I generate an embed link and then I embed the link in my lecture page. You can see the look of the lecture in the second uploaded image. The three dots on the side only show download transcript and keyboard shortcuts.

The students can still download transcripts and can still cheat using AI. I have asked Canvas support how we can turn the download transcript option off and the only way is to disable captioning. Disabling captioning hurts  students with learning disabilities. When I started teaching online, I was told that it is considered good practice to enable captioning for students. So I am very hesitant to disable captioning.

Is there anything I can do to disable transcript download w/o disabling captioning? Has anyone found a workaround for this?

Thanks

Naji Dahi

[Gabriel33 · Accepted solution]

Indeed that doesn't seem possible within Studio, or at least it wasn't 2 years ago, given an earlier question on this issue: Solved: Re: Disable Transcript Download - Instructure Community - 577271

While I don't consider using AI to study before the exam to be cheating, and ignoring the question of whether transcripts are required for accessibility, it may be feasible to do what you want by doing it outside of Canvas Studio:

If you can download the video and the captions, you may then "burn" the captions into the video (so they're not separable text files anymore, but actual parts of the video frames), and then re-uploading the video (disabling Studio captions, as the burned captions will already be in the video).
This may harm accessibility a bit (due to the captions perhaps not optimally scaling with video size), but it shouldn't be noticeable for most users.
It may also be moot, as a student can just have the AI listen to the video instead.

[lroe]

I am having the opposite problem. I have students submit videos. If I suspect they have used AI to write their script, I like to download the transcript and feed it into an AI detector. I also sometimes like to read along while they are speaking. The 'download transcript' feature has disappeared from my course. Anyone know why? 

[Gabriel33]

@lroe You might want to make a new post. I only got notified of your reply because I posted here before, but most people who come to this forum are unlikely to see this.

-edit-

Nevermind, just saw you did here https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Studio-Discussion/Studio-transcript/td-p/647807