Adding captions to lectures is a great way of increasing student engagement and accessibility for your courses. This article outlines how you can add captions to your course.
Auto-Generated Caption Program
As part of Udemy’s plan to expand the global reach of instructors, and help make course content more accessible to students around the world, we provide English, auto-generated captions for English video lectures. When English isn’t the native language of a student, captions can make courses easier to comprehend. Further, captions also provide more clarity, reinforce learning, and make courses accessible to hearing-impaired students.
For more information on this program please click here.
Creating Captions
There are a few ways that you can create captions for courses. Udemy relies on .vtt files for caption uploads, so any method you use will need to create a .vtt file (please note that captions are not a simple transcript or script of your course, but must be in this specific file format).
You can create .vtt files from scratch, using a simple text editor (for more info, please click here), and you can use free captioning software like Aegisub (link here). You can also use paid services like Cielo24 (link here).
Udemy has also started to provide automatically generated captions, which you can download, edit, and add to your course (please see the section "How to Edit Captions" below).
How to Upload Captions to Your Udemy Course
Once you have prepared the .vtt caption files, you can upload them to your course lecture by following the steps below:
1. Navigate to the Course Management page and click on Captions on the left hand side
2. At the top of the Captions page, select the language of the captions that you are uploading
3. Move your cursor to the video lecture that you have created captions for, and click on the upload icon
4. Once the caption has been successfully uploaded, the .vtt caption file will be visible
How to Edit Auto-Generated Captions
As noted above, Udemy provides auto-generated, English captions for courses in English. For more information on this program please click here. If you would like to improve and edit these captions for your course, you can do so by following these steps:
1. Click Captions on the left hand side of the Course Management page.
2. On the captions page, click the download icon on the right hand side of the lecture to download the .VTT caption file for it.
3. Open the .VTT file in a text editor on your machine, and make any necessary edits to the caption text (there are also a number of caption editing programs available around the web, with examples linked here). Save the changes you make, keeping the file in .VTT file format.
4. Upload the caption file to the corresponding course lecture by clicking on the upload icon. Your revised caption file will automatically replace the auto-generated caption file attached to the lecture.
How to Delete a Captions File
If you need to delete the captions file for a lecture, simply click on the trash can icon that appears on the right. Please note that the .vtt file cannot be recovered once it’s been deleted.
How to Disable or Enable The Captions
If you need to disable all of the existing captions for a specific language, you can quickly do so by following these steps:
1. Navigate to the Captions page
2. Select the language of the captions that you wish to disable
3. Click Disable on the right hand side
To enable the caption files, simply follow the steps outline above and click on Enable. Please note: in order to make the Enable icon active (green), each lecture on the Captions page must have a .vtt file uploaded to it.
If you have any additional questions regarding captions please contact Udemy Support.