How to easily add captions to your MOOC videos?

MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) are appealing to a growing number of universities, organizations, and educators.

The great thing about platforms like EdX, Udemy, Moodle, Coursera, and Coursesites is that they are hosting and sharing your educational content to your students, and can even monetize their access to a wider audience. Pretty useful, right ?

Yet, this cannot be done without considering issues such as video accessibility. Adding captions is particularly important to facilitate reading and comprehension for any type of audience, and in any type of circumstances.

As a subtitle specialist, we give you a good way to make them as professional as possible.👩‍🎓👩‍🎓

Why subtitle your MOOC videos?

MOOCs are platforms that have earned the trust of universities and major companies to broadcast videos for educational purposes. But smaller players have also taken up the challenge: educators, teachers and coaches use their interface to make their courses available to their students.

While these are great tools for disseminating your knowledge and skills to a wide audience, the challenge is to make your videos accessible. Not being able to discuss with you face-to-face, your students may lack essential information to understand your course materials. Not being able to contact you directly, they may lose time in their learning. Therefore, subtitles allow you to improve the pedagogical impact of your educational videos.

But there are other equally crucial reasons to consider:

• With textual cues, you increase the engagement and memorization of your students (especially those with visual and poor auditory memory).
• You open your courses to students of all languages and nationalities.
• You enable students with hearing loss to understand and attend your classes.
• You provide a visual support for them to ask questions and continue the discussion.

Here's how you can do it right.

Online course captioning : the different methods

Doing subtitles has traditionally been the job of professionals, but many possibilities have now appeared on the Internet. If the task is still as complicated to do by yourself, automatic subtitling solutions are one way to save a little time.

To add subtitles to your MOOC videos, platforms such as Udemy, Coursera, Edex, and others usually have a feature to add files such as SRT or VTT.

Here are different ways to proceed:

• Create the subtitle file by yourself.
• Use an automatic SRT or VTT generator to do the job
• Calling on a professional

For the first alternative, we warn you, this can be a rather long and complicated task, especially if you have a lot of video volumes. If you want to give it a shot, you can try to transcribe the audio by yourself following the .srt format or using a software like Aegisub. Then all you have to do is upload the file.

But if you want to proceed professionally, we recommend the other two alternatives that we will describe to you.

How do you add professional subtitles to your educational videos?

There are many solutions for automatic subtitling. Their voice recognition technology handles your educational projects efficiently and accurately, and allows you to edit and optimize the result by yourself.

Here we tell you about our automatic Checksub solution. With these advanced features, it has been designed for professionals in the video and educational world :

• A powerful speech recognition API
• Professional support from subtitlers and translators to take care of your video project
• A machine translation engine to translate your video, including 128 different languages available.
• A powerful and easy-to-use online subtitle editor

Here is the quick and easy way to use our subtitle generator and editor.

1# Upload your online course

To get started, register on the Cheksub platform. Select your content and indicate its original language. You can also choose between many languages to do the translation if needed.

You have 1 hour of video to test the platform. If this is not enough time for your first video, you can buy credits at a low price.

The API will then perform the speech recognition and provide you with the result in a few minutes.

2# Optimize the result

When the result is ready, click on the language of your video and access the dedicated subtitle editor to check the synchronization.

Here are a few tips to optimize this task:

• Cut your sequences into 2 sentences of equal length. It is often easier to divide your text into sentences. Go to the settings button to "divide my text by sentence".
• Arrange the text sequences at the exact moment the speaker starts speaking. If the speaker is speaking fast, you can try to remove a few words but not the beginning or ending words.
• Always display the characters when the speaker's lips move (important for those who read with their lips).
• Be sure to display a subtitle at the beginning of a scene and remove it at the end of the scene.
• Repeat several readings by yourself to check the fluidity of your subtitles.

3# Download and use the SRT file

When you are satisfied with the transcript, you can download the .srt file. By adding it to your MOOC platform (on the subtitling interface which is often quite easy to find), you then make your subtitles immediately available to your students.

That's it! As you can see, the process is still quite complicated to do by yourself. Luckily, at Checksub, we offer you a professional service to take care of all your video projects. Take a look at it.

E-learning transcription: the benefits

Before testing all this, we have another piece of advice to give you. We recommend that you create a textual transcript of your online courses, to provide with an easily available teaching support.

Here are some of the benefits of this method:

• You provide a visual support that your students can easily rely on.
• You can transform your improvised video lessons directly into notes and teaching aids.
• You can provide a summary of your teaching to students with comprehension problems or who want to save time.

This is how you make your online courses accessible to everyone. We hope it will make a big difference to your teaching experience!

‍