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 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.
Please note: over the coming months Udemy will also be creating auto-generated Spanish and Portuguese captions for courses with videos that are instructed in these respective languages. If you're working on a new course in one of these languages, it will be automatically captioned when it’s published. Spanish and Portuguese courses that are already published will gradually receive auto-captions over the coming months.
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 Captions
As noted above, Udemy provides auto-generated, English captions for courses in English. For more information on this program please click here.
For steps on how to use the captions editing tool to improve the captions that have been added to your course, please refer to this article.
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.
If you have any additional questions regarding captions please contact our support team.