Adding captions to your video lectures is a great way of increasing student engagement and accessibility for your courses. This article outlines how you can create, add and manage captions for your course, and how you can edit auto-generated captions that have been added to your lectures, if required.
Auto-Generated Subtitles 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, Udemy provides auto-generated subtitles for thousands of courses. Learn more about Udemy's subtitles program.
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, or you can use free captioning software or paid services. We recommend searching online for more information regarding how to create captions or using captioning software and services.
Udemy has also started to provide automatically generated subtitles, 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 Captions
Learn how to use the captions editing tool.
How to Delete a Captions File
If you wish to delete a caption file you created and uploaded to a lecture, then click on the ellipses on the right hand side, and select Delete. Please note that deleting a caption file cannot be undone.
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, each lecture on the Captions page must have a .vtt file uploaded to it.
