Were you aware that Instructure provides a video hosting and collaboration solution, Canvas Studio? We weren’t sure, so we thought we better ask before we share some exciting news -
All video guides will be migrating from Vimeo
to Canvas Studio by July 31st.
Why are video guides migrating to Canvas Studio?
We’d be remiss if we did not start this section by expressing how grateful we are to Vimeo for the 12-year partnership that made it possible to provide you with a top-shelf video viewing experience. Vimeo is a great tool with great people!
The Instructure Community video guides are moving to Canvas Studio so we can showcase what an awesome tool Studio is and save a little money along the way.
How will this migration impact my:
Community Experience?
You may notice video pages looking a little more crisp and on brand. However, there will be no difference in the way you can search and discover videos or view them directly in the Community.
Course Experience?
Courses with embedded videos or videos linked via Vimeo URL will be impacted by this migration. We encourage you to prioritize updating embedded videos to their new Canvas Studio URL and linked videos to their new Community page URL by July 31, 2023.
Admins, if your institution utilizes domain restrictions on your network, it would be advantageous to check that *.instructuremedia.com is on the allow list.
Bookmarked Links?
You can leverage the Canvas Video Links spreadsheet to update your bookmarks.
What other changes are planned for video guides?
When the Community Team kicked off this project, we wanted to better understand how you all access and leverage guide videos. Here’s what we uncovered for 2022:
- 4.9 million video views
- 1.4 million unique viewers
- 21 years of time spent watching video guides
- 1.4 million videos watched to completion
- On average 60% of a video is watched
- The majority of videos are viewed from a desktop and accessed via Instructure Community
Strategy Evolution
The 4.9 million views demonstrate the value of video, however, the 1.4 million videos watched to completion along with the average 60% view duration tells us we may need to evolve our strategy. In the past, we’ve taken the approach of 3-5 minute videos with multiple concepts. Your clicks and views, along with video media trends, encourage us to shorten our videos and keep them specific to a single concept or task. We also believe there is value in connecting the video guide to the written guide by embedding the video at the top - providing multi-modalities of learning in one resource.
There are a lot of new trends and ideas that we expect to surface with growing research and development in AI (artificial intelligence). We’ve already identified one tool (Guidde) that we will be exploring to increase the efficiency in our video production.
Archiving
Increasing the efficiency of our video updates and production is important, as there are currently 90 video guides for Canvas alone. Eight video guides would need to be updated each month in order for every video to be updated within a calendar year, and this doesn’t even factor in the impact of releases and videos for other Instructure products. At eight hours per video production, you can see how it quickly becomes a single person’s full time job just to maintain video guides.
While we look to AI and shortened, single-concept videos - we call them shorts - we need a plan that brings the number of videos to a more manageable number. We’re starting by identifying the 50 most important Canvas video guides to be maintained, based on total views and the complexity of a concept. The remaining 40 Canvas video guides will be archived throughout the following year. This archive will not occur all at once; it will be based on when a video becomes outdated. Once a video that is identified for archive becomes outdated, it will receive a banner which labels it outdated. The official archive date, which will be roughly 30 days following the banner, will be provided. Some archived videos may be replaced by a short. We will do our best to redirect those archived URLs to newly-created shorts to assist with preventing broken links.
We are excited to learn more about Canvas Studio through this project, and we hope you are too!
