Editing YouTube Captions for Readability in Canvas Studio Using AI
This post is a follow up post to my last post: Canvas Studio’s Auto-Captioning Feature Does Not Work for Videos Added by a YouTube Link. This might make a bit more sense if you read and watch that video first. As I was saying in the previous video, many faculty use videos from YouTube in Canvas Studio, which doesn’t bring over the captions for those videos. And if you manage to get those captions into Studio, YouTube doesn’t always do a great job of presenting those captions. Just click CC on my YouTube video below to see how bad they are. It’s basically just words on the screen with no punctuation or formatting, which is really not acceptable.
This video demonstrates how to add accurate captions to videos using YouTube’s auto-generated captions and a chatbot to insert punctuation and improve readability in Canvas Studio videos.
Canvas Studio’s Auto-Captioning Feature Does Not Work for Videos Added by a YouTube Link
Canvas Studio is an interactive video platform integrated within the Canvas learning management system (LMS). It allows educators and students to create, upload, and share videos directly within Canvas courses. Canvas Studio offers auto-captioning for videos. When you upload a video to Canvas Studio, you can generate captions automatically. The auto-captioning feature uses speech recognition technology to create captions, which are then editable to ensure accuracy. This feature helps make video content more accessible to all students, including those who are deaf or hard of hearing.
However, Canvas Studio’s auto-captioning feature does not work for videos added by a YouTube link. The auto-captioning functionality is only available for videos that are directly uploaded to Canvas Studio. When you link to a YouTube video within Canvas Studio, you can still use YouTube’s own captioning tools if the video owner has enabled them. However, the direct auto-captioning and editing features of Canvas Studio won’t apply to these externally hosted videos. To utilize Canvas Studio’s auto-captioning, you would need to download the video from YouTube (if allowed), upload it directly to Canvas Studio, and then use the auto-captioning feature. Alternatively, you can rely on YouTube’s captioning options or manually add captions within Canvas Studio after uploading.
All of those options for getting captions on YouTube videos added to Studio are not great. You can’t download videos from YouTube legally, and if it’s not your video, you can’t download or access the captioning file. Finally, who has time to manually add captions to a video? Not me.
There are several ways to get the transcript from a YouTube video. Most will just give a text file with no formatting and no timestamp, so you end up manually editing and wasting just as much time as if you created the file yourself. Here’s a process I use:
Creating Closed Captions for Online Course Videos
If you’re teaching online and providing media for your students, you must provide closed captioning or alternative materials for students to be in compliance with accessibility requirements for schools.
Closed captioning provides access to videos by displaying auditory information in printed form on the screen, which gives students who are Deaf or hard of hearing equal access to your class. Closed captions also facilitate greater understanding of media content for people who speak English as a second language, as well as make it easier for the audio content of videos shown in large lecture halls to be understood.
I’m just now getting around to providing the closed captioning, as I’ve been relying on providing alternative materials for students who have requested them in lieu of watching a video or listening to a podcast. Actually I haven’t had a request ever in my classes in over 10 years of teaching online. But this semester I will be prepared thanks to the services built into YouTube. Yes, YouTube provides closed captioning on all videos. In fact, if you don’t provide the transcript, YT will attempt to transcribe it for you. Don’t get too excited, as it’s not very good at that job. At least not with my videos it wasn’t. I think I may talk too quickly and mumble too much for it to get all my words correct. That’s okay because at least it gives you something to start with, and some of what it transcribes is correct, saving you a little time.
It’s very easy to do. Read more
