Update (March 5th) - The new player will be deployed and enforced in Beta environments on March 19th, with a production rollout scheduled for April 19th. Key updates include a redesigned media player, enhanced accessibility, and overall usability improvements. No new functionalities requiring additional learning will be introduced. Early access to new features will remain available through the closed beta group, which you can sign up for here.
We’re excited to announce that we’re inviting more users to join our closed beta and explore the latest ideas for the new media player in Canvas and Studio.
Our goal is to gather feedback and refine our approach through ongoing discussions every 2–3 weeks. Recently, we asked for input on a variety of different audio layouts designed to enhance the course page experience in Canvas. We also tackled another important topic—how videos function as intellectual property and what safeguards we should implement to help protect them. Primary focus was on watermarking, its content and how to avoid overlaying a watermark on top of certain copyrighted materials.
The feedback we received was invaluable and with the group continuing to share their thoughts, we’ll be able to implement things more quickly.
Looking ahead, we have a few more exciting topics to discuss, including:
- Automated captioning (one of our top priorities at the moment)
- Rolling transcripts next to the player as an additional learning aid
- Private student notes to personalize learning
- The value of video chapters, automatically generated with AI
- Custom branding for your media player, so it feels tailored to your institution
- Many more!
Later in April, we’ll run a prioritization round, where we’ll gather all the discussed topics and determine which ones are the most important to tackle first and which can be pushed to a later phase. If you want to influence this, then we are happy to add you to the group. Please submit the form below by March 5th, and we will send the invitation the following day. We plan to keep the form open for a few more days before closing it.
Some frequently asked questions:
- Who needs to sign the form?
Root LMS admins. - Can I join as a teacher?
Absolutely! Reach out to your Admin, and we’ll add both of you. This is essential since we cannot enable the player at an individual level—it will be activated for your Canvas beta instance. - When will the new player be available in production?
We plan to launch the new player in Canvas and Studio as part of the April 19th Canvas release. It will be the default media player with no feature option. - What will happen to the group after the release?
The group will remain active even after the release. As we are going to add some of the aforementioned solutions throughout the year, group participants will always have early access to those! We will quickly iterate based on their feedback and be able to catch bugs early!
See you in the group,
Akos
