Video Captioning (January 2017 tip)
By Laura Hamrick
Need a pedagogical New Year’s resolution? Consider captioning your video content!
Captions allow students with hearing disabilities to access the content of your course, and also improve learning comprehension for students whose first language is not English. Captions can benefit students who learn best by reading, and are useful for courses involving complex technical vocabulary. Furthermore, if you caption your video on YouTube, a searchable transcript is automatically generated that allows students to review your content more effectively.
If you want to start captioning your videos, consider the following tips.
If you don’t have time to caption your own videos, TAs and other student assistants can help! Captioning is a great opportunity for them to help improve your course. OIT’s captioning service can provide training for TAs or students to enable them to produce high-quality captions.
Create scripts for your course screencasts as you make them. Then you can simply copy-paste your script into YouTube to be synchronized with the video. Some screencasting softwares like Camtasia also allow you to create your own captions directly in the software.
Don’t forget to add in any important non-speech sounds like [buzzer sounds] to your captions! For more tips like this, check out the Captioning Standards for Quality Checklist on the .
Need technical help or more tips on captioning your videos? Learn more in this month's Tech of the Month article. You can also get in touch with OIT’s captioning service for a free consultation or training at help@colorado.edu or (303) 725-4357 (5-HELP).