LC Elevator + Canvas = Easy Media Streaming for Your Students!

 Note: This tip was updated on August 10, 2021 with minor changes. 

Need to assign media stored on LC Elevator to your students?  Make it easy for them by using the nifty Elevator / Canvas integration or LTI, and embed the media directly in your Canvas course page! Here’s how: 

Add the LC Elevator LTI to Canvas: 

LC Elevator will need to be enabled within your Canvas course site before you can begin using it.  Within your course site, select "settings," which is near the bottom of the left-hand column. Next select "apps." 

You should see an icon for Elevator. Click this icon and select “+ Add App.”

In the field that says "What is the name (URL) of the instance you'd like to use?", enter lc.elevator.umn.edu. (You just need to change the default text before the first period from “dcl” to “lc”. Now click the "Add App" button. 

Add your Media to Canvas 

Now you’re ready to use the Canvas/Elevator integration! If it doesn’t work yet, wait a minute or two and try again. 

In Edit mode, the top menu includes the Rich Content Editor (RCE), which allow you to embed a variety of media on a Canvas page:

Because the options in this menu are extensive the menu is often to wide to fit on the screen. In this case, the menu is truncated, and only the first few text-focused icons are visible:

The three vertical dots at the right indicate that this menu of icons is expandable.

Click on the vertical ellipsis icon on the far right-hand side of the top menu to expand it:

This will display more options, including all of the methods for embedding media in Canvas, with the next icon on the list selected (in this case, the link icon):

Click on the carrot next to the icon that looks like a plug. This will display all of the third-party apps you have installed.

Select "Add Asset from Language Center Library."

The first time you use this feature, you may need to click View All first, and then select Elevator.

This will launch the main page of LC Elevator. From there, you can search for your media. Once you have located your media, select the streaming image under “Streaming Video” or “Streaming Audio". There may be two Streaming Video options: one called “Streaming with Subtitles," and another called “Streaming without Subtitles."

 Note: Be careful to select a Streaming icon, NOT Cover Art. If you select Cover Art, your Canvas page will have an image that looks playable to students, but is as static as a piece of cover art. 

Some LC Elevator records have multiple streaming files associated with them. The asset with the red box around it is the one you are adding to Canvas. 

Click on the “Add to Canvas” button on the top left-hand corner, and you’re done! Note: this button is white and is easy to miss. 

Students will be able to play the media within the Canvas page, or for video content, expand and watch full screen. 

NOTE: If this is the first time you try to embed a video in a Canvas page from Elevator, you may need to select the Language Center Library from a larger dialog box, in order to make it readily available. A clue to this step is if the plug-in icon in the RCE menubar does not include a downward-pointing caret:

In this case, when you click the plug-in button, a large dialog box appears in which you can indicate which plug-ins you want to have available to you. In the screenshot below, the Elevator Language Center Library is the first option. To make this plug-in available, click the boldfaced line "Add asset from Language Center Library":

Follow the steps above to embed the video on the page. From now on, the interface should appear as it does above, with the caret displayed on the plug-in button.