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. 

One of the most empowering ways educators can engage students is by letting them take charge of their 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 State of Teaching and Learning in K-12 research identified student engagement as teachers’ #1 priority. 

For this reason, 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. Still, with Canvas Studio, teachers can access various 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. 

Teachers can quickly create, deliver, and manage interactive digital learning experiences in Canvas Studio. It boasts many 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 result is a media platform that promotes involvement through interaction and participation—not just indifferent consumption.

The ability to annotate videos is another benefit educators can use to add headline descriptions and display texts with links to guide students through video content. This feature, combined with the ability to break longer videos into multiple modules, gives faculty the flexibility 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 consistently wondered, “Is there any way to know if students watched the video we shared?” 

With Canvas Studio, the answer to that question is yes. By using Canvas Studio to create video course announcements, 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 the 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 on campus, like weekly preview and recap videos where faculty posted a short video using Studio to set student expectations and evaluate their progress over the week. ISU found that videos under 6 minutes increased student engagement and sparked more collaborative peer-to-peer and peer-to-teacher discussions. 

Recap videos such as these also benefit 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 system, and instructors can 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. Hear the rest of Amy Ward’s experience in Achievement Unlocked: Students Engaged During Your Video.

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.