We’ve heard consistent feedback around the need to support meaningful student engagement and accessibility—while also simplifying workflows for both instructors and learners. As part of our broader focus on creating more intuitive and streamlined day-to-day experiences in Canvas, we’re continuing to invest in improvements that make it easier to teach and learn with confidence.
Today, we’re excited to share how those investments are coming to life in Canvas and Studio video experiences.
On April 18th, we took another step forward in our commitment to video accessibility and transformed passive video viewing into a more active learning experience. After a successful Early Adopter Program, we are officially rolling out Interactive Transcripts across Canvas and Studio. We are incredibly grateful for our Studio Community, who helped shape this experience across the tens of millions of videos added to Canvas each year.
Interactive transcripts improve accessibility for everyone
Interactive transcripts are transforming video content for students by automatically scrolling in sync with the speaker, supporting in-video search, and helping students better navigate the content. In a survey of 32 students, a significant majority of 87% reported a preference for the new video experience. They specifically noted that the additional learning aid makes everything feel clearer and less stressful. Notably, the remaining students expressed no preference, with not a single respondent favoring the previous version.
At the same time, seven out of eight educators said it provides a superior experience, noting that students are likely to incorporate it as a regular learning practice. Core features like navigation, auto-scrolling, jumping between sections, and search received overwhelmingly positive feedback from educators.
One interesting question was how our new in-line tools interact with the existing Caption Editor. The short answer? They’re better together. Canvas media does not have a separate Caption Editor and we did not see any reason for gating it away from Studio content. After all, our aim here is to make sure you can do as much without navigating away from the course content as possible. So, which should you use?
- The In-Line Editor: Perfect for high-quality audio with 90%+ accuracy where you just need to polish a few words without leaving the page.
- The Caption Editor: Best for complex synchronization (academic terminology, acronyms, unique names etc) and deep structural edits.
See it in action for Canvas videos!
Flexible playback controls support different teaching approaches (Studio only)
When it comes to video playback speed, educators take different approaches. Some want students to engage with content exactly as intended, while others prefer to give students the freedom to control how they watch. For example, slowing down a sign language video makes it much easier to follow, which compromises its use for formative assessments. Conversely, speeding up video content can distort viewership data, making it inaccurately represent student engagement.
To support this range of needs, playback speed can now be configured at the individual video level. Instructors can decide when to allow flexibility and when to guide the experience more closely, without needing to re-embed content. These settings can be adjusted at any time through the Studio Media Options tray, making it easy to adapt as course needs evolve.
The flexible Studio embedded views solve a hidden UX challenge (Studio only)
For years, the embedding process in Rich Content Editors was the following for Studio content: pick the content from your Library or course -> decide whether you need the Media Tabs -> embed it to the Page -> adjust the size to align it with the Page design. While enabling the Media Tabs created a substantial, though potentially excessive, dedicated content area, it offered the benefit of immediate access to the Caption Editor and Media Insights (and also allowed students to leave comments if that was the primary need). It’s become easier to use over time…but we always knew there was room for refinement.
We’ve evolved this on multiple fronts:
- Dynamic embed views: Instead of having only one way to add Studio content, different views are pre-set for you to accommodate media-rich pages with a video thumbnail, a standard-sized media player, or a media-view that allows for student commenting. These are dynamic, meaning they are interchangeable at any time without re-embedding.
- Direct access to insights and captions: We removed the concept of media tabs and instead provided direct access to Media Insights and the Caption Editor. This ensures the page design remains unaffected while allowing you to access these tools without navigating away.
- Viewer restrictions: Key settings for the viewer experience, such as the ability to download media or transcripts, and lock playback speed, can now be configured under Studio Media Options.
Feedback has been largely positive, with an average score of 4.2/5 for overall user experience improvements. One user even noted the change was "long overdue".
This functionality is available with Canvas Plus, Canvas Next, and our legacy Canvas Studio add-on. Learn more about the new Canvas tiers here.
What else should I know?
The Early Adopter Program served its purpose precisely – the group flagged bugs, reported edge cases and highlighted functional gaps (New Quizzes, Submissions) before the wider rollout to millions of educators and learners. Here are some of the most important ones:
- Editing the transcript: Currently, you need to ensure the width of the embed is at least 720px for the rolling transcript to display. We’ve implemented a new "extra large" Player Layout to help with this, but the free-hand resize tool also works. We are already working on a more seamless solution.
- New Quizzes and assignment submissions: For now, these areas will use the previous viewing experience. In New Quizzes, the new experience will only appear if the New Quizzes Canvas Native Integration Feature Option is enabled. For assignments, we decided to stick with the previous experience to ensure simplicity for students picking and embedding videos for submission.
- YouTube transcripts do not display as rolling transcripts - The most frequent demand in the EAP was showing transcripts for YouTube content the same way as for uploaded videos. These captions are not hosted by us (see YouTube Player for Education FAQs) which would be required to display them. We recognize the significant value this would provide and we plan to implement it in a future update as soon as feasible.
- Retaining comments and media insights when adjusting embed views - This addresses a frequent question and is precisely why the new embed process is called dynamic: any changes to the view or viewer restrictions will not result in data loss.
- Caption generation for Canvas videos can take up to 24 hours, which seems excessive - In reality, this process should only take a few hours at most. However, please note that we are enabling caption generation for tens of millions of video content added annually, and that presents a significant challenge as we are concurrently committed to maintaining the current minute-level turnaround for Studio content.
Let us know if you have any questions!
Best,
Akos
