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Canvas Spotlight

Incorporate YuJa Into Your Canvas Course

Last updated on February 16, 2023

Like Frankenstein needed electricity to bring his creation alive, we too need to energize our content to bring it to life. No matter how fascinating a subject material is, it’s your unique presence as an instructor and use of multimedia that makes it appealing, relevant, and genuine. As our world continues adjusting to online learning as a norm, we can adapt and leverage the tools at hand to maintain instructor presence online and improve learning experiences. Today, students expect and benefit greatly from multimedia experiences.

Are you looking to upgrade your tried-and-true course materials, improve engagement, and get the most out of your online classroom? Do you want to optimize your own time spent editing and uploading videos while ensuring your content meets accessibility standards? Enter Yuja.

YuJa is a powerful video tool you can use to meet these needs while adding media to your online classroom. With YuJa, you can convert your presentations into engaging lessons and incorporate multimedia principles into your content. You can also house all of your recorded lectures in one place, make basic edits to your presentations, and embed videos directly into your Canvas course. YuJa makes it easy to take your content online with voiceovers, screencasting, and maintaining your video library.

Best Practices

Why should I use this?

  • Providing learners with multiple modes of learning — pictures, text, and audio voice overs — allows them to dive deeper into your content while building stronger connections with you and your course’s material. Consider this in your general practices. 
  • YuJa is the only video platform recommended for Canvas. This is because third-party sites, such as YouTube, create ads, and the video may or may not always be available or accessible for learners. YuJa is also the only video management platform MSU Denver’s ITS department officially supports. 
  • Accessibility is made easy with YuJa – editing your captions, transcripts, and annotations can easily transform a presentation to meet the needs of all learners. 
  • With YuJa, you can embed directly into your course. You have a limited amount of space in each of your Canvas courses, but embedding YuJa content does not use any of that allotted storage space. 
  • By recording your own lectures in YuJa, you can engage students with instructional techniques such as incorporating a personable tone and using cursor tools to point out key information. Consider including yourself on camera — this humanizes you and embodies your instruction. Instructor presence in presentations helps learners feel like the presenter is talking to them and they will be more motivated to comprehend your content. 
  • Apply the dual-channel principle in your YuJa videos. Utilize both visual-pictorial content along with auditory content to maximize the retention of your instruction. 

When should I use this in my course?

  • Decide when, where, and how to incorporate YuJa videos into your course. Determine which Canvas pages will be using videos. Instructor Introductions, adding voiceovers to your powerpoint presentations, and embedding videos you already have in-use are great places to start implementing YuJa videos. 
  • Anytime you upload a video to YuJa for use in your course, be sure to review it for accessibility. You can always edit captions for it and add annotations if they are needed. Check out these tutorials on editing captions in YuJa and adding audio annotations to your presentations to get started on reviewing your content for accessibility. 

When should I not use this?

  • Your YuJa media should be aligned with the objectives of your course. If the video you are uploading for content delivery or as a learning activity does not support students meeting a course-level or module-level objective, question whether you can use an alternative method for delivering your content. Extraneous or unnecessary videos may only cause cognitive overload for your audience. Learn more about how to build multimedia effectively in this CTLD Spotlight on Multimedia Principles.
  • If you are linking Youtube (or another video management platform) videos using YuJa, make sure to check the Youtube videos against MSU Denver’s Instructional Accessibility Guide and Multimedia Accessibility Guide. Do not use videos that do not meet these standards.
  • When importing Youtube videos to your YuJa account, review the TEACH ACT information YuJa provides in the process of importing videos to ensure the content adheres to copyright standards. Before importing media with an owner other than yourself, please review MSU Denver’s Intellectual Property Policy and MSU Denver’s Online and Digital Course Materials Policy.

Let’s walk through it together

Tutorials

How can I post materials using YuJa?

Whether revising content, updating material, or bringing a course online for the first time, there are many features YuJa offers that make delivering your multimedia intuitive for you. Embedding a YuJa video directly into a Canvas course will ensure it stays available and free of advertisements. In addition, embedding with YuJa doesn’t use any space in the 5.2GB of space each Canvas course is allotted. This can be important if you have a lot of material already in your Canvas course or plan to.

How can I make content accessible using YuJa?

YuJa can help remove barriers to accessing content fully in your classroom. To bolster the accessibility of a classroom, YuJa has features that allow the user to edit captions and download transcripts. Any time you upload a video to YuJa, YuJa will generate auto-captions for it. You will likely be utilizing specific, academic language in your presentations that may be difficult for YuJa to auto-caption, so it is important that you ensure the information is accurate. You can also add audio annotations to your videos, which provide learners with auditory descriptions of the relevant information you want your learners to understand. 

What can I edit with the YuJa video editor?

YuJa includes basic editing features that help you cut sections of video, add images, add sound recordings, and more. 

How can I use YuJa to create more engagement in my course?

Incorporating the dual-channel principle, making your presentation accessible, and timing your presentation are all invaluable strategies to utilize in your YuJa videos. After reviewing our Spotlight on Multimedia Principles, see the following tutorials to effectively integrate your presentations with YuJa. Besides your video lectures, some thoughtful places to add YuJa videos in your course are in your instructor introduction, in quizzes, or in announcements. 

  • Review our tutorial on adding voiceovers to your PowerPoint for more info on voiceovers 
  • Incorporating video submissions is a great way to create engagement in your course, but we recommend using GoReact rather than YuJa for this instance. This is because the overall student experience is better with GoReact when it comes to recording and submitting responses. To review your options for assigning students using video submissions, review this tutorial on GoReact