The New Navigation Experience
Unifying the product experience and user interfaces in Canvas has been ongoing for a while now and will slowly be adopted by all Instructure products. Studio is no exception, it is going to benefit a lot from this update in the long term and we are happy to share that it will receive the new navigation experience on May 6. For a quick illustration, let me show you the difference between the current and the upcoming design as it can be seen in a Studio course collection.
And the updated design:
In terms of functionality, we’ve made one change to simplify the experience. After careful consideration, we decided to reduce the media to be accessed in a course to the 1) course media, 2) the user’s own library and 3) the media shared with the user. Since Studio today is an LTI tool (psst, at least for now), it was a mere technical side effect that resulted in the same experience in the course content and in the global Studio access when you open your own Media Library. In the rare case you cross-referenced videos from course A to course B (embedded a video to a course from a different course), it will require some video management in your own library first - this limited workflow will help organize your content better at the end of the day, which will be further supported with the Media Library’s overarching UI update arriving this summer.
Furthermore, the design changes update the tray on the left and moves access of those functions into a menubar on the top:
Studio Capture gets Picture-in-Picture support
While we originally wanted to add it in March, we decided to focus on the stability and robustness of the new screen recording solution, and add new capabilities continuously. This seemed to be a good decision, the solution is super solid, any interrupted recording due to connectivity issues or browser crash can be one-click recovered during the next Studio launch. This makes it a great alternative for Screencast-o-matic and we are currently seeing 35% of all recordings made with Studio Capture as evidence for it! Have YOU tried it? 🙂
Picture in picture is our next new addition to it however, you will see the below popup when enabling the webcam during tab or window.
As of now, webcam during screen recording will only be available when sharing the entire screen; in exchange, that will give you the option to move it anywhere on the screen (even while recording), or zoom in and out. As a sneak peak, we are already working on the capability to blur the background!
Docs update - Integration via Postman
We heard it quite a few times that our guides are not clear when you want to connect to Studio via Postman. For that reason, we will update the guides and provide you a video tutorial as well to make sure it is smooth and easy.
Auto-publishing Captions - later in Q2!
Reflecting on my previous blog post on auto-captioning all videos, I wanted to give you a quick update here that after some discussion, we decided to implement auto-publish as well. The congruent feedback was that sometimes it is still better to have unreviewed captions than no captions at all for students requiring accessibility. Don’t worry, the admin and user level controls in the Settings will let you opt-in or out for your new uploads anytime.
Stay tuned!
