Overview
Canvas instructors can create playlists that reside in a Media Gallery. This tutorial walks you through how to create one.
These instructions are specific to Canvas instructors.
Critical Concepts
Things to Keep in Mind
- Playlists can only be created by instructors. Students aren't able to create playlists within a course, though they CAN add media to the Media Gallery.
- You must be a media owner or co-publisher. In order to add an entry to a playlist, you need to either be the owner/creator of the media or be a co-publisher.
- Playlists are course-specific. Playlists live in a Media Gallery, not "My Media," so each one is specific to a course. That also unfortunately means that you can't copy or republish them in other courses without manually recreating them.
- You can put any type of media in a playlist. It doesn't just have to be videos.
- Creating a playlist adds a "Playlists" tab at the top of the Media Gallery that is selected by default when a user lands on the page. We're not able to change which tab users land on by default, unfortunately.
- Creating a playlist automatically publishes those media within the "Media" section of the Media Gallery. Course members can find the media within the playlist or as individual entries in the "Media" section of the Media Gallery.
- Deleting the playlist does NOT unpublish the media from the "Media" section of the Media Gallery. So if you don't want course members to be able to see those particular pieces of media, you'll need to manually unpublish them. See our tutorial on how to unpublish media from a Media Gallery if needed.
Steps to Take
- If you're not already logged into Canvas:
- Go to https://canvas.ucsd.edu.
- Enter your active directory credentials.
- Within Canvas, enter the course in which you want to create a playlist by either clicking on the course in your dashboard or clicking Courses and selecting the course.
- Within the course navigation on the left side of the page, click Media Gallery.
- Within the Media Gallery, click the Channel Actions icon (it looks like three horizontal lines) and select + Create Channel Playlist.
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Edit the playlist title, description, and tags, as desired.
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Go to the "Add Items To Your Playlist" section and click the + (plus) icon next to each entry you want to add to the playlist. The items you add will show up on the right side ("Playlist").
Tips for Creating Playlists
- Use the search field. Kaltura will only show the 16 most recent entries in your "My Media" when selecting items to add to a playlist, so it's likely you'll need to use the search field to locate the media you want to add.
- You can change the order of items you add to the playlist. You can drag and drop them using the icon that looks like two horizontal lines.
- When you're done adding items to your playlist, click Go to Media Gallery at the top of the page.