Studio Lookout 2025: Insights From Our Early Adopter Program

AkosFarago
Instructure
Instructure
16
2409

Canvas.png

If you are following the blog, you know that our current focus is rolling out the updated media player experience, replacing it everywhere across Canvas and Studio. As we are reaching this milestone with its release, I wanted to take a moment and share the updates coming your way with Studio.

First, we couldn’t reach such a milestone if it wasn’t for the participants in the Early Adopter Program. A huge THANK YOU to everyone there—your early testing and feedback are truly invaluable. This Program will remain active beyond the production release, where we will continue to gather feedback on hot topics like video accessibility, AI solutions in video learning, captions translations and so on. While some will be added to Canvas videos too, we are going to shift our focus to Studio additions.

Release plan: as we are synchronizing all the updates to Canvas and Studio media, the release will occur on the April 24th. This is mainly due to the combined release of 3 major changes: updates to the Studio media player, standardizing the experience for Canvas media and starting to roll out Adaptive Streaming (which will last through April 30th).

What’s ahead?

Over the past three years, our focus was on accessible content creation, personal video management and helping admins support Studio at scale. With the redesigned Video Library and the new Admin Media Management UI, we can now shift some of our attention towards the learners' experience and improve video learning from a viewing perspective. New features we have in the works will be closely connected to the following challenge: How can students get more value from videos? How can we make video learning more intuitive and personal?

While some of this can be tackled with introducing interaction to videos such as embedding quizzes or adding annotations, we want to maximize the learning potential of plain videos too. Automatically generating captions is a foundational capability, but it also unlocks powerful tools to make videos more engaging. For instance, allowing students to follow a transcript alongside a video provides valuable learning support, which can be further enhanced by enabling them to link private notes to specific content with additional context.

The rolling transcript will come to all Canvas and Studio video content in 2025The rolling transcript will come to all Canvas and Studio video content in 2025

Assisted caption editing - Minimize the time you spend correcting captions

Automated captions, of course, need corrections. While editing them can be time-consuming or costly—and often feels like a tedious task—it’s essential for making video content accessible. Since accurate captions serve as the foundation for many future tools, we want to help you accelerate the review process.For institutions using Studio, we’re testing an assisted solution that proactively highlights caption blocks that need attention. As a result, we expect the caption review process to substantially decrease.

It will be an experimental feature that we will roll out in May to participants in the Early Adopter Program to collect feedback on the experience. Join the Program until May 12th!

assisted editing.png

Let’s put AI to work - Some future topics in the Program 

AI will do a fantastic job with accessible captions. Just a few things that we heard from you recently: 

  • Caption translations will further aid retention, not to mention the increased comprehension when learners see text in their native language alongside the spoken content.
  • Video segmentation (“chaptering”) not only helps learners navigate videos more easily, but it also enables educators to automatically break longer videos into shorter, more digestible pieces, addressing the challenge of decreasing attention spans.
  • Video summarization will provide learners with a quick overview of the content, helping them grasp key points efficiently.

We want to hear your voice while we explore these AI topics, so we will keep our Early Adopter Program going through the end of September. 

Video Quizzing - Laying the groundwork first

Last year, we had great conversations with ~25 institutions about video quizzing—diving into everything from its role in assessments to the key features missing and, even testing out prototypes for creating quizzes directly from courses. We’re excited to make progress on these learnings but want to note that, with our focus on building and delivering some of the exciting video learning solutions mentioned above, you can expect to see updates related to video quizzing landing in 2026. These changes will be soon reflected on the Studio roadmap.

Join the Studio Early Adopter Program until May 12th!

Best,

Akos

 

16 Comments
Jeff_F
Community Coach
Community Coach

These developments should prove to be very helpful in so many ways. 

AntonioPC
Community Member

These updates are very interesting. I’d love for this project to also consider administrators and instructors, especially in terms of statistics and security.

As a teacher, I’m interested in knowing what percentage of each video a student has watched, and also being able to view stats for all video views in one place—without having to check them one by one.

On the security side, it would be great to ensure that Studio videos are not easily downloadable.

We’re looking forward to the upcoming updates from Studio.

Thank you.

GarethLogan
Community Explorer

Hi @AkosFarago 

Thank you for the update and for all the fantastic work you and the team have done with Canvas Studio — we’re really enjoying getting started with it.

One issue we’ve come across is around accessibility and captions. Specifically, when users upload YouTube or Vimeo videos into Studio, the captions from those platforms don’t carry over, and Studio doesn’t auto-generate new captions either. This creates a challenge from an accessibility standpoint.

I know it's technically possible to upload our own captions manually, but in practice it’s quite time-consuming — especially when it involves downloading transcripts from YouTube, editing them for accuracy, and then uploading them separately. For a large institution with a diverse range of accessibility needs, this presents a real barrier to using Studio effectively for third-party content.

We’d love to take full advantage of the great features Studio offers for YouTube uploads — like quizzes and assessments — but this issue makes it harder to do so.

Is this something currently on the roadmap — either pulling in captions from YouTube/Vimeo or generating them automatically in Studio?

Thanks again,
Gareth

CarolaUSC
Community Participant

Thanks Gareth for highlighting this issue. We have the same challenge and are having to turn off  the import option for uploading YouTube/Vimeo into Studio for this very reason. It would be great if Studio could automatically include the native YouTube/Vimeo captions.

Regards

Carola

Jeff_F
Community Coach
Community Coach

Regarding YouTube embeds, my understanding is that Studio cannot generate the captions as this is some way is a violation of the YouTube terms of service. 

Thinking of a workaround, if that type of media is added to Studio, then when it is added to courses could we configure Studio to add a line of text and a link to the media on the original provider by default appears under the media? For example:

 

Screenshot 2025-06-12 054145.png

 

--------------- 

ps. this is perhaps my favorite guitarist - 

Paco de Lucia - Entre dos aguas (1976) full video - YouTube

dbrace
Community Coach
Community Coach

I like @Jeff_F 's idea. The two (potential) concerns I could see with that are:

  1. the creator (potentially an instructor) would not have the ability to track the viewing analytics/insights of the video if a viewer/students goes to YouTube (yes, I know that viewing a video does not mean that a viewer/student watched the video)
  2. the creator (potentially an instructor) might have created a Studio Quiz to go along with the YouTube video (yes, the viewer/student could watch the video on YouTube and then return to the the LMS to watch, and take, the Studio Quiz)

-Doug

mary-anne_saund
Community Member

Also, if the Youtube video changes where it is in Youbtube (ie. the URL for the Youtube video changes) then the studio embed doesnt work. Often happens.

dbrace
Community Coach
Community Coach

@mary-anne_saund, unless I am not understanding your comment, yes that does happen. Unforunately, that is not something that Studio or the Canvas LMS can fix. When a content creator on YouTube changes a video, that can mess up the link or embed on any website or document.

Hildi_Pardo
Community Coach
Community Coach

Hi @AkosFarago - I have a teacher that just wrote me asking:  "We were told the ability to stop students from skipping ahead on videos was coming for this school year. I'm unable to find such a feature. Do you have a status update?" 

I know it's too late to join the EAP for this (I thought I had, but perhaps I didn't).

Can you share a timeline for this?  Or is it possible to still be added to the EAP? 

Thank you!

dbrace
Community Coach
Community Coach
szabarovska
Community Contributor

I’m really excited about the YouTube migration tool and have already tested it out. That said, our next concern is ensuring captions are retained when creating Studio quizzes. Some instructors are building quizzes from YouTube videos (both their own and others’). From what I can tell, they’ll need to download the .srt file, upload it to Studio, and then attach it to the video. If there’s an easier solution or if this process is documented elsewhere, could someone please share it with me?

 

Thank you!

AkosFarago
Instructure
Instructure
Author

@szabarovska the new Player For Education does carry over captions from YouTube, so it is no longer needed to download the .srt file.

Hildi_Pardo
Community Coach
Community Coach

Hi @AkosFarago - now that we have the YouTube Migration tool, I've migrated several videos in a demo course and went to see my Course's Studio Library.   I don't see any way to make "folders" or organize my Studio Library in my course.   I would love to be able to organize my course Studio Library, for example, as Unit 1 Videos, Unit 2 Videos, Examples, etc.    Otherwise I could have a very large library and difficulty finding what I need.   Is this in the works, by chance?   

Love all the updates in Studio!  Thanks!

szabarovska
Community Contributor

Hi @AkosFarago ,

Yes, that is correct. My question is regarding the YouTube videos that are imported previously and Canvas Studio quizzes have been created. From my testing, closed captions are not added to those quizzes. I would like to know if there is a work around for this or would the instructor have to recreate the quiz? 😮💨

I understand in reality, they are two different systems but was hoping the CC's would copy over to the quizzes as well.

AkosFarago
Instructure
Instructure
Author

@Hildi_Pardo that is not planned at the moment in context of the migration tool, but subcollections are not that far ahead.

@szabarovska we backfilled everything added before 2021, no matter if the video has quizzes added or not. If you DM me the video link we can look into this quickly.

Hildi_Pardo
Community Coach
Community Coach

that is amazing, thank you @AkosFarago -- as these studio youtube videos will greatly extend the contents of the library -- it will be so good to be able to organize and categorize them soon.  Thank you.