From Indifferent to Involved: Transform Student Engagement with Canvas Studio

The Importance of Student Engagement in Today’s Classrooms

Learning isn’t meant to be a one-way street. 

And one of the most empowering ways that educators can engage students is by letting them take charge of their own learning. 

Educators agree that student engagement is critical to student success. In 2021, one of the six key trends we identified in the State of Student Success and Engagement in Higher Education was that faculty-student engagement is critical whether in person or through technology. Similarly, the research in the State of Teaching and Learning in K-12 identified student engagement as teachers’ #1 priority. 

It is for this reason that educators are consistently seeking out tools to give students the opportunity to lead the charge in their learning and engage with course material in innovative ways. 

Showing a video to a class hasn’t always been seen as an active way to engage students, but with Canvas Studio, teachers have access to a wide range of tools to encourage their students to interact with video content.

What is Canvas Studio? A Robust, Distraction-Free Video Toolkit

Many teachers are already incorporating video content into their instruction. So, Canvas Studio seamlessly supports this strategy through a variety of features. 

In Canvas Studio, teachers can quickly create, deliver, and manage interactive digital learning experiences. It boasts a broad range of integrations with other video tools like Webex, Panopto, Zoom, and Echo 360. Additionally, it enables audio and video content creation, in-video discussions, embedded quizzes, and more. The end result is a media platform that promotes involvement through interaction and participation—not just indifferent consumption.

The video experiences created through Canvas Studio are free from any ads or marketing on content originating from YouTube. This saves teachers both the time spent searching for video content that is appropriate for their classrooms and the worry of the algorithm serving up an inappropriate video.

The ability to annotate videos is another benefit that educators can use to add headlines, descriptions, and display texts with links to guide students through video content. This feature, in combination with the ability to break longer videos into multiple modules, gives faculty the flexibility they need to serve instructional content in the format that makes the most sense for students.

An added benefit of Canvas Studio is that it easily integrates with Canvas LMS, meaning that teachers and students can access the platform on the navigation menu they’re already familiar with.

How Canvas Studio Transforms Student Engagement 

There are many practical ways that educators can engage students with Canvas Studio.

Educators at Virtual Arkansas were consistently wondering, “Is there any way to know if students actually watched the video we shared?” 

With Canvas Studio, the answer to that question is yes. By using Canvas Studio to create video course announcements to mini lessons and personalized feedback, the tool has lightened the burden of video content creation, added another avenue for teachers to build rapport with their students, and provided teachers with data-backed insights into where students are and aren’t engaging with course material. In addition to engaging students at the classroom level, Virtual Arkansas has used Studio for professional development efforts of their staff.

“Studio allows our PD training to be both synchronous and asynchronous. That way, teachers can access all recordings from the session on their own time and rewatch as many times as needed.”-Kirsten Wilson, Director of Curriculum and Instruction at Virtual Arkansas

For students and faculty alike, Canvas Studio has made content accessible to all, empowering them to learn together. Dive into the rest of Virtual Arkansas’s Canvas Studio story here.

At a recent Canvas Caravan event, Amy Ward, Learning Technologies Coordinator at Iowa State University highlighted effective strategies used on their campus like weekly preview and recap videos where faculty posted a short video using Studio to both set student expectations and evaluate their progress over the week. ISU found that videos under 6 minutes resulted in higher engagement from students and sparked more collaborative peer-to-peer and peer-to-teacher discussions. 

Recap videos such as these are also especially helpful both for students and faculty during finals season. Students seek out these videos to quickly review portions of the course they would like to master before the end of the course and instructors are able to identify which topics students engaged with the most and where additional support is needed. 

Like other Canvas Studio users, faculty at ISU appreciate the ease of access to analytics data to see where students engaged with their videos and where they struggled so that they can quickly adjust instruction. To hear the rest of Amy Ward’s experience in Achievement Unlocked: Students Engaged During Your Video, click here.

How to Sign Up for a Free Canvas Studio Demo

To learn more about how Canvas Studio turns class content into conversation and breaks the fourth wall of education, explore the K-12 and Higher Education Canvas Studio guides.

And if you’re ready to see how your campus can deliver interactive video experiences with Canvas Studio, let’s connect.