Using AI to Support Teaching & Learning: Captioning and Quiz Question Generation
AI is all the rage these days, specifically generative AI. It seems as if everywhere I turn there are articles about new tools and new debates about their usefulness. Although that might be because Google’s algorithms know I’m interested, so they keep feeding me stuff. The next person may see nothing about generative AI. Oh, well. I’m obsessed. I just started a module with my ENG101 students on rhetorical analysis, and we’ve been exploring how to use generative AI tools to help with that process. I made sure to find database sources for them to use, which makes it more challenging to have the chatbots do all the work for them. And then we’re using website articles to practice with. It seems to be working well. I have a sense that students are quicker to understand analysis by doing it this way.
But I’m also looking for a way to get the chatbots to help me with streamlining my processes. I’m pretty solid with my content knowledge at this point after 30+ years of teaching, but I could use some time-saving hacks. One such hack is writing quiz questions and captions for YouTube videos. I’m a firm believer in not reinventing the wheel, so if I find a good video that already shares the essential points of a lesson, I’m using it. The problem is, if I put that video in Canvas Studio and create a quiz, it takes a long time to caption the video and write the quiz questions.
I discovered recently that YouTube videos added to Canvas Studio don’t have the captions attached. I can go over to YouTube and copy/paste the transcript for the video, but I would still need to match up the words with the video which can be time-consuming. It’s actually faster just to transcribe it in the captioning editor. But who has time for that? At that point, it would be easier to just create my own video, which Studio will auto-caption for me. But I found a solution online using a website https://downsub.com/ that will take a URL from a YouTube video and provide an SRT file with the subtitles that you can then just upload to the video in Studio. The website is super sketchy, so be careful if you use it. I’ll show you how in the video below.
Once I have the captions in place, now I need to create a quiz and add my questions. Super easy to do in Studio, but it’s tedious and time-consuming. For this, I found a Chrome extension, NoteGPT: YouTube Summary with ChatGPT & Notes. Make sure you’re using the Chrome browser. The original script for the extension was to summarize YouTube videos for you, but I was able to edit the script to make it write quiz questions. That makes me sound like I’m really smart, but don’t worry, it wasn’t that complicated. The following video will show you the whole process in case you want to replicate it yourself.
Video Link: https://app.screencast.com/3Anjh9XC7a5W1
