Hi there. If you teach online and host your videos in YouTube like I do,
understanding how to embed them in Canvas and what the student experience is like on a computer and
on a phone is super important. So we're going to talk a little bit about that today. First of all,
there are two ways to embed a YouTube video in Canvas. You can do what I refer to as an
auto embed using the link from YouTube. And when I say link I mean something that looks like this.
Or you can do a manual embed which requires you to add the html code into Canvas.
And when I say html code I mean something that looks like this. So in this video iIm going
to show you how to do both of those things and also demonstrate what the difference is from the
student experience. So here I am in YouTube. And this is a video that I want to embed.
What I'm going to do is click on the Share option in the lower right corner and that's going to open
this screen. And from here you see a link. This is the Share link and then you also see an option
for embed. Let's get started with the link, ok? So i'm going to click on it and select Copy and
that has now copied to my computer's clipboard. I'm going to go over to a Canvas page and I want
this video to be embedded just underneath this line here where I'm introducing my students to
the 90 second video and encouraging them to watch it. So i'll select edit in the top right corner,
scroll down to where I want that video to go - right there, right? And then I'm going to
on my keyboard do a Command V for paste and hit enter one time on my keyboard. Now the reason you
have to hit enter or return on your keyboard is because that turns it into a hot link.
Right now it's a dead link and it's not going to work. So if I hit enter now you can see it's blue.
I'm just going to backspace to get rid of that extra space it made but you want it to display as
blue. And I'll click save. And now you can see that video right there, right? Looks looks okay um
I can click on it and it'll play. So my students can use it pretty well there. One of my intentions
for including this video is to humanize this page. This is my home page that my students see right
off the bat when they come in the first week. So I want them to see me and I want them to hear me
and so being sure that it renders in a way that shows me is really important.
But here's the thing folks, I want to show you what this
auto embed option looks like on a phone if a student is using the Canvas student app.
This is the exact same page on a phone in the Canvas student app and check out the way my
video looks there. It's right here. First of all that link is not rendering as an accessible link
because it doesn't describe what it's pointing to like the link just below it does. Also,
that's not very humanized is it? I mean, sure, I can tap on it and it's going to open and play
but students aren't being greeted with my human presence which is really a big part of my
intention. Let's take a look at the manual embed option. So let's go back to that video in YouTube
and just like before at the lower right select Share. And this time we're going to click on
Embed. This is our embed code. I'm going to click on it one time. You'll see that it highlights and
then in the lower right corner select Copy and it will copy it directly to my computer's clipboard.
Now I'm going to go back to Canvas and on my Canvas page select edit in the top right corner,
find where I want that video to go. Again, I want it to go right here so I'm going to click there.
Now this is where things get different. In my toolbar, I want to look for the Embed option so
what you're looking for is this little option right here. It kind of looks like a cloud.
Now if you don't see it in your toolbar – like I didn't – you have to click on the three dots,
which is the More option. And that will show you the embed option. So select that icon and
you'll you're presented with an embed code box. Click in that box and paste
your embed code then select Submit. Now I see a nice large embedded video. I will now click Save
and you can see how that video renders on a computer. I can play it. The captions show
as long as they're toggled on. And now let's see what it looks like on a phone. So here's the same
page in the Canvas student app on a phone. I'm just going to scroll down and there's the video.
And when I tap on it Hi there and welcome to our course. it plays
and shows the captions as long as those are toggled on on the user end. And that is why
I prefer to use the manual embed option with the html code in Canvas.