Adding captions to lectures is a great way of increasing user engagement and accessibility for your courses. This article outlines how you can add captions to your course.
Creating Captions
There are a few ways that you can create captions for courses. Udemy Business 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.
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
If you would like to use the captions editing tool to improve the captions that have been added to your course, please follow the steps below:
1) Click Captions on the left hand side of the Course Management page.
2) On the captions page, click Edit on the right hand side of the lecture you wish to edit the captions for. You will be directed to the caption editing tool.
3) Navigate between the caption entries by clicking the text in the right column of the editing tool, or by clicking around the progress bar of the video player, which corresponds with the timestamp.
4) As you watch the lecture video, you can make edits to the captions in each timestamp entry, by clicking on the entry and typing in the change. As you type your edits in the caption entry on the right, you will also be able to see the changes on the lecture player screen.
5) Once you’re done editing the captions, click Save and Publish at the top right of the page
Please note: after clicking Save and Publish, the changes to the course captions will become live in your course. If you exit the captions editing tool without publishing the changes you’ve made, any changes you’ve made will be discarded.
The captions editing tool can only be used to edit the text of the captions, and not the times. If you wish to edit the time of the captions, then new captions files will need to be uploaded by following the steps listed above.
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:
- Navigate to the Captions page
- Select the language of the captions that you wish to disable
- Click Disable on the right hand side
To enable the caption files, simply follow the steps outlined above and click on Enable. Please note: in order to make the Enable icon active (red), each lecture on the Captions page must have a .vtt file uploaded to it.