Moodle is a leading e-learning platform used by millions of teachers and educational institutions over the world. One of its benefits is to provide a reliable teaching system especially for educational videos and classes record.
However, while these videos are very useful for sharing your knowledge and skills, they need to adapt to some distant learning issues such as video accessibility.
And for that, subtitles are quite frankly perfect!
Checksub is a leading subtitling specialist, and we'll help you add subtitles to your Moodle courses.
Why add subtitles to your Moodle videos?
Moodle is probably one of the best known Learning Management Systems (LMS). Its ease of use and comprehensive features have appealed to many educational organizations and educators. In addition, with the widespread use of distance learning, Moodle videos make video teaching much more convenient.
But it also can lead to new issues. For example, since your students cannot contact you directly, they may lack essential information to understand your courses. Similarly, some students may not have the same ease in retaining information included in a video or speech presentation.
In the face of these problems, subtitles provide essential benefits:
- They improve the teaching experience of your lessons by giving visual support to your words.
- They open your videos to students of different languages and nationalities.
- You make your videos accessible to people with hearing or comprehension problems.
- You allow your students to react back on what you have said and continue the discussion.
Subtitling is therefore very useful for teachers. Here are the different ways to do it.
Moodle subtitling: the different ways to do it
Simply put, subtitling on Moodle is about adding a subtitle file, the only format accepted is VTT. So how do you get such a file? There are three specific ways :
- Create by yourself the file
- Use an automatic subtitling solution
- Use a professional subtitling platform
The first alternative is, let's be honest, complicated. To make a file by yourself, you have to transcribe the audio and synchronize the time codes of your video by hand. It's rather long and requires quite specific skills. That's why doing subtitles is a job. However, if you have guts, here is a guide to help you make a VTT file.
The second solution is to opt for an automatic subtitle generator. There are a lot of them on the internet, like the one on YouTube or Authôt. All you have to do is upload your video and the voice recognition technology will transcribe it in no time. But the results are sometimes variable and require editing work.
Here we show you our professional solution that will be able to handle a larger volume of online courses.
How do I make professional captions on Moodle?
Innovations in the field of subtitling are multiplying, and there are more and more solutions available online. But it is the solutions dedicated to professionals that are most effective for high demand and high volume projects.
We present here our automatic subtitling platform in collaboration with professionals (agencies and freelancers). It includes powerful features :
- An advanced speech recognition API
- A collaborative interface with subtitlers and translators to handle your video project
- A machine translation engine to translate your video, with 128 different languages available.
- A powerful and easy-to-use online subtitle editor
Here is a quick and easy way to get started with our subtitling solution.
1# Add your video to the interface
To get started, sign in on the Checksub platform. Select your content and indicate its original language. You can also choose from a wide range of languages to perform the translation if necessary.
You have 1 hour of video to test the platform. If this time 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# Adapt and 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's often easier to divide your text into sentences. Go to the setting button to "divide my text into sentences".
- Arrange the text sequences at the exact moment the speaker starts speaking. If the speaker is speaking fast, you can try to delete 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 delete it at the end of the scene.
- Repeat several readings by yourself to check the fluidity of your subtitles.
3# Download and send the SRT file to Moodle
When you are satisfied with the transcription, you can download it. By adding it to the Moodle interface, your subtitles will appear immediately.
As you have noticed, this is not the easiest process. Fortunately, if you don't have a lot of time or if you have a big project, you can contact our professional monitoring service. We have subtitling and translation professionals who will take care of all your video projects. We'll let you try it out.
Moodle Transcription: the little-known benefits
Before you leave, we have another piece of advice for you. A verbatim transcript of your online courses is a teaching aid available to your students. Think about it, it's a practical solution!
Here are some benefits to a transcript :
- You provide a visual support that students can more easily understand and memorize
- You can transform your improvised lessons directly into notes and teaching aids.
- You allow an audience who has comprehension problems or who wants to save time to read a summary of your lessons.
That's it, you can now make your lessons understandable for everyone. We hope that this will stimulate your students' minds!
