Youtube Education Links

Question

While working on an alternative to convert YouTube embeds to Canvas Studio using the Canvas API, I stumbled across how Canvas Studio actually calls the YouTube videos. The link uses YouTube Education (youtubeeducation.com) to pull the videos. I figured instead of converting every video within a course to Studio first, I could just use this link (along with the configs that Studio already uses). I was wondering if this might be against ToS to use what I'm pretty sure is Canvas Studio's API key to YouTube Education to create ad-free videos for students.

Let me note what the main scope of this project is:

Normal YouTube embeds inherently have ads from YouTube. This became a problem when we noticed that within a quiz with a YouTube embed, students got stuck on an ad, affecting the functionality of the quiz. When trying to figure out how to fix this problem, I workshopped a tool that can convert YouTube embeds to Canvas Studio (because of its lack of ads) in bulk throughout courses. Basically, my tool would upload each YouTube embed to a specific Studio Collection, then change the actual iframe to link to the Studio video instead. The complexity of this script becomes pretty rough when having to deal with duplicate video links. This is something that can be done using the YouTube Content Migration feature; however, this feature requires manual clicking of each video in each course, which cannot be done in bulk.

Once I stumbled upon how Canvas Studio actually pulls these YouTube videos without ads, I realized that this could be the most efficient way of creating ad-free embeds. Instead of making the script upload the YouTube links to Studio, I could instead just change the source of the iframe to include the same www.youtubeeducation.com link that Studio already uses with their embeds. Doing it this way removes a ton of complexity from the script and allows bulk updates of all YouTube embeds.

The only issue I have with this is that I'm not entirely sure if Canvas Studio allows this use of their connection with YouTube Education. Our Institution will still need the Canvas Studio subscription for this to work, so this method is not bypassing any paywalls that could lead to controversy. I want to confirm that using Canvas Studio's link to YouTube Education is valid.

Note:

@Akos Farago I was asked by Jeff Ferner to refer this post to you.

Thank you

-Kolton Galie,

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU)

Akos Farago · Answer

@KoltonGalie thank you for sharing this with us.

Your finding is correct, the hash has not much to do with the API key that we use to create the distraction-free experience and it is unique for each video.

While at the moment we don't have immediate plans to implement bulk conversions, over the past few months we've gained valuable insights into how this feature would perform at a course or account level if we roll it out down the line.

KoltonGalie · Answer

After further testing, I realized what I thought was a "key" to Canvas Studio's connection to YouTube Education is in fact a hash that is uniquely linked to each video. This "key" is only known by YouTube Education and Canvas Studio, so it's actually extremely hard (or impossible) to use the YouTube Education embeds without first uploading to Canvas Studio.

I will be switching back to my original plan of uploading each YouTube embed to Canvas Studio and dealing with the issue of duplicates, which is complex but still possible.

If anyone has any suggestions or questions about my testing, please feel free to reach out.