SSU currently licenses Camtasia to provide screen capture and video editing capabilities to SSU faculty. Faculty can use Camtasia to record and edit instructional videos, including capturing their computer screen or slide show, and create video quizzes and embed them in Canvas.

Best Practices

• Whenever possible, instructional videos should be 10 minutes in length or shorter and should have an activity at the end that applies the video's content. Research has shown that students' attention in a passive learning situation, such as watching a video, tends to drop off significantly after that time. Also, novices need time to process new information before they can remember it. By making your videos short and requiring students to apply their understanding of the content afterwards, you are likely increasing the amount of your content that they remember over the long term. Additionally, if you make a mistake while recording a shorter video, you have less work to do to correct or replace it than if it were a longer video. So recording shorter videos saves you time and effort, too.
• In order to share a video that you've produced in Camtasia, you'll need to export the video from the Camtasia project. We recommend that you export the video as a Local File onto your desktop, since you can then upload it to Google Drive or YuJa, and from there add it to Canvas. We don't recommend that you upload videos directly into Canvas. Canvas is not designed to be a media server, so large videos can slow your course website down. For a guide on how to do this, see Resources (below).
• Accurate captions are essential for students with hearing disabilities, but they also help many other students, including students with learning disabilities like ADHD, working students, and any student who doesn't have a quiet study space in which to listen to instructional content. Unfortunately, Camtasia does not have a built-in automatic caption generator. To learn more about how to get automatically generated captions for your existing videos and what your legal responsibility is to manually correct those captions, please view the Accessibility and Equity section of our Academic Technology page. To learn more about how to edit captions in Camtasia, see Resources (below).

Resources

• How to download Camtasia from Software Center (coming soon)
• Official Camtasia Support Center
• How to export videos from Camtasia
• How to edit video captions in Camtasia

Get Support

If your question isn’t answered by the above resources, we encourage you to visit CTET either in person or via Zoom, submit a help request, or just email us. We are happy to do a 1-on-1 training or support session with you. You can find our current business hours and contact information, including our Zoom link, on our Contact Us page.

Student Support

CTET only supports faculty, not students. Additionally, Camtasia is only licensed for faculty and staff, not students. If you would like your students to do any video editing for your course, we recommend that you look at YuJa, which has a video editing suite. If YuJa won't meet your needs, we suggest that you talk to us directly about other options. You can find our current business hours and contact information, including our Zoom link, on our Contact Us page.