As distance learning has become widespread, e-learning videos have become essential to keep an interactive learning experience.
Whether on Blackboard, Udemy, Coursera or Teachable, they bring the question of making e-learning accessible to all of your students and learners (some are hard of hearing, or have difficulty retaining audio information).
How do you adapt your content to this audience? Adding good subtitles is part of the answer!
As a subtitling expert, we will show you how to add subtitles to your teaching content professionally. 👨🎓👨🎓
What are the benefits of good e-learning subtitling?
Let's say for a moment that you want to make your new online course available to your students.
Of course, your talent can naturally help your students to learn in the same way as in a classroom or face-to-face session. But the problem is that they won't necessarily be able to ask you directly for additional information. Not being able to ask you questions, they will have to fend for themselves, and may miss parts of your course.
This has 3 consequences:
- You need to make your content as clear and visual as possible.
- You have to adapt to an audience that does not have the same ease of audio and video comprehension.
- You need to give them a course material they can come back to.
Faced with these three pedagogical challenges, subtitles are an essential tool. Here are other big benefits of good subtitles :
- Make your courses accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people
- Open your teaching to many languages and nationalities
- Increase the engagement and learning experience of your content (better understanding and memorization of the message)
- Allow easy quoting and bouncing on what you've done by email or otherwise.
Here's how you can do it easily.
SRT or VTT file for your online course: how to get it
If you create and publish your online courses on an e-learning platform, the simplest method is to import the subtitle file. Most platforms (Udemy, Blackboard, Teachable, Kaltura…) support relatively universal formats such as SRT or VTT.
But how to make this type of file? You can try to create it by yourself, but we warn you that it may take a lot of time.
Instead, there are automatic speech recognition solutions that will do the job for you. Here we show you the process in a few steps for our automatic subtitling generation Checksub :
1# Upload your course to the interface
To start, log in on the Cheksub platform. By logging in, you will have direct access to the platform to upload your video. Select your content and indicate its original language. You can also choose between many languages to make the translation if needed.
To try the platform, you have 1 hour of video for free. If this is not enough, 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# Verify and optimize the transcription
When the result is ready, you can click on the language of your video and access the dedicated subtitle editor to check and optimize the synchronization.
Here are some tips to optimize this task:
- Cut your sequences into 2 sentences of equal length. It is often easier to split your text in sentences. Go to the parameter button for "split my text by sentence".
- Arrange the text sequences at the exact moment the speaker starts speaking. If speakers speak fast, you can try to remove a few words but not the beginning or ending words.
- Always display characters when the speaker's lips move (important for lips-readers)
- Make 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# Import the SRT or ATV file on your educational platform
If you are happy with the result, you can upload your .srt or .vtt file from the "export" button. All you have to do now is to upload it on the video interface of your educational platform.
How to professionally subtitle your e-learning video?
As you can see, with such a solution, you can get subtitles and have them available to your students in a short time. But it's also true that it can still take quite a bit of effort, especially if you have a large volume of content and if you want foreign languages!
Fortunately, subtitling services can put your project in the hands of agencies or freelance subtitlers and translators. Checksub for example can connect you with those kinds of professionals. But there are another alternatives on the internet if you want.
You won't have to worry about that anymore, and you'll get an impeccable result. Don't hesitate to call on these services!
E-learning transcription: easy solution
As another interesting teaching tool, video transcripts give you a reliable pedagogical support. It can even allow you to create course content and notes from documents or video conferences!
Here again, doing it by yourself is rather difficult. There are many online transcription software on the market that will do it for you just as well. Checksub's platform is one of them.
We'll let you try it out. Otherwise, we hope it will help your learners to love your classes!
