Virtually Autumn: Video distribution and accessibility

Once you've made a video, now you have three major tasks remaining, for your students' benefit. You should

• distribute that video file to your class
• ensure that the video is captioned (provides the text transcript of speech in the video, for blind/visually impaired students and many more!)
• make a time-stamped table of contents for the video

Distribution

There are many ways to share your .mov or .mp4 or other format video file; the choice might depend partly on your institution's policies and your own comfort with who can access the video you've created.

Options include:

• Embed the video in your Learning Management System (LMS) website for your course
• Pros: only available to your students
• Cons: for many LMS, the large video files are not stored within the LMS - you might still need to upload them to a different server and then embed the file by linking it to the LMS; you will need to figure out how to caption the video
• Add the video file to a file sharing site like Google Drive or Box or Dropbox
• Pros: you can control who has access (and what kind of access: view only, upload/download, etc.)
• Cons: you may have file storage limits that you would eventually exceed by storing large video files; it may be tedious to manage file access, depending on how many students you have in your class; you will need to figure out how to caption the video
• Upload the video to YouTube (or another public video platform like Vimeo)
• Pros: automatic captioning (detailed below), unlimited file storage, good analytics tools (read my blog post on the types of incredibly useful analytics feedback you can get on your videos), creates hyperlinked Tables of Contents (detailed below), can share links to specific video frames
• Cons: I'm still trying to think of one (let me know in the comments!)

I'm a big fan of using YouTube to host videos, so the rest of this post will focus on YouTube features. I'm not providing a walkthrough of how to sign up for and customize your account at YouTube, which is part of Google, so if you have a Google account, you have a YouTube account.

Before we proceed, now is a good time to note that there is no way to make a video completely private (unpiratable), no matter how much security you place on it.

If you create a video for others to view, then it can be pirated.

Even if you upload a video to your LMS, so that a student has to login to your campus website to view your video, and only students enrolled in your course can get to that website, they can still, at worst, play the video on their computer and use another device to record their computer screen and audio as your video plays. Such a "bootleg" copy won't have the same quality compared to the original, but the user will still have their own copy of a video file they could then share with others. The same is true of hosting a video on YouTube: although users cannot download the original video file - they can only watch - they could use the same tactic to make their own recording of your video.

Captioning

Providing video captions is incredibly important, not only from an accessibility perspective. You have the ethical and legal (at least in the USA) obligation to provide accessible course materials.

Why caption?

There are many reasons to caption videos (other than it is required)! Here are a few that students have mentioned to me:

• Students want to watch a video in a loud environment where they can't hear the audio track (and don't have earbuds/headphones)
• Students want to watch a video in a quiet environment where they can't make noise (like a library, public transportation, etc.) and they don't have earbuds/headphones
• Students want to watch a video in either type of environment, and they do have earbuds/headphones, but their bluetooth headset has lost power and they want to finish watching the video…
• Students are non-native English speakers and benefit from hearing the audio and seeing the written words
• Students don't know how to spell and/or pronounce technical words and benefit from seeing the word and hearing the pronunciation at the same time

I'm not even remotely deaf, but I can attest I've benefitted from captioned videos in at least all of the above situations.

When/what to caption?

There are lots of questions I have about captioning that I consider to be in a legal/ethical "gray area," and that is because I'm not an expert in the laws surrounding course materials accessibility. Although I won't greatly elaborate on them now, such questions include:

• If I don't have a student registered in my course that has officially been granted a disability accommodation that requires video captions, do I still need to caption my videos? (I'd say: yes, especially if you intend to use the video in future courses, when you might have a student that would require captions)
• If I am capturing live lectures, which is a situation where blind/visually impaired students don't get accessibility accommodations, then do those videos need captions? (This is an important question to seek clarification from your administration on. My personal perspective is that lecture capture is simply an honest recording of what happened in the physical or digital classroom - so it is no less accessible as a recording than it was in the original face-to-face or virtual classroom…but I still caption them!)
• If the video provides a resource for students, but I do not require students to watch it for class, does it need to be captioned?
• How accurate do the captions need to be? Is capitalization and punctuation critical to include?

When I started creating educational videos (years ago), I manually captioned them - meaning I typed out the text transcript as I watched the video after recording it. I found that it took me between three and four minutes to transcribe one minute of video. This was not a great use of my time, and it was impossible to caption lecture capture videos.

Thankfully, Apple's Clips app came along (which I discussed in yesterday's post: it "live captions" content), so I used it to make some of the short one- to two-minute format videos I use for class purposes. Otherwise…

How to caption

…I rely heavily on YouTube's automatic captioning. It is fast, it is free, and it is pretty accurate. When I began using it, "deoxyribonucleic acid" would not get transcribed correctly, but at present I find that many technical terms are being spelled correctly, requiring minimal editing from me.

I have two caveats to share about YouTube captioning:

• It can take a while (minutes or hours) for captions to be generated, depending partly on how long the video is, so plan ahead and be patient
• Captions are a text file that YouTube overlays in real time onto your original video file. Your video file isn't altered by the addition of the captions. In other words, if you download your video file from YouTube after captioning, you won't see the text captions in the video…so you can't use YouTube as a service to generate a captioned video file that you could then post somewhere else. However, because the captions are a text file, you can download that transcript file from YouTube for later use (like providing it elsewhere as a downloadable file for students to access along with the video).

Here's a walkthrough video I created (in Clips, using content mainly generated by QuickTime Player screen capture) showing how to upload a video to YouTube and then how to locate and edit the automatically generated captions.

YouTube video security options

As an aside, it is worth noting that, when you upload a video, you make a selection of the privacy of the video. At present, you can choose "public" (which was my choice in the walkthrough video), or "unlisted" or "private."

• Public videos can be viewed by anybody and are able to be found by the search function on YouTube.
• I use this option for class-related videos where students are not identifiable (important because of FERPA), because I like the idea of others, aside from my current students, being able to use my videos for their education.
• Unlisted videos cannot be found by search, but anybody with the URL to the video can view it.
• I use this for personal videos and for posting Zoom meeting recordings, because these would not be useful to the public, but I can easily share them with small numbers of people by e-mailing them the link to the video. This would be reasonable to use for classes if you don't want to make your videos public. However, note that anybody who shared an unlisted video URL with their friends, or posted it publicly elsewhere, would then let others view the video
• Private videos can only be viewed by users that you grant access to in YouTube by entering the other users' e-mail addresses.
• I set some of my old videos to Private when I don't want to delete them but don't want anybody to be able to access them. For me, this is usually when I've posted exam key videos. After the end of the semester, I make those unlisted videos private, so that students in future semesters can't access them.

Table of Contents

Especially for long videos (but even for short ones), it can be very powerful if you can inform your viewers about the timepoint in the video when different topics are introduced. A table of contents of the video. I confess, I do not do this for lecture capture videos - but I do it for every other video I publish.

What is really great about YouTube is that you can add a Table of Contents in the video description window, and then when users view your video, the timestamps you put in the Table of Contents are automatically hyperlinked to those times in your video.

Beneath the video, the Table of Contents contains times (in blue, which are hyperlinks) next to brief descriptions of the content of the video at each time

Thus, when a user loads your video in YouTube, instead of watching from the start to wait until you start discussing the concept they want to learn about (at 13:12 in the video), if the Table of Contents reads "13:12 introduction to the ablative case," then the user clicks on "13:12" and the video jumps to that time and begins playing. You can see an example of this in the caption-editing video from above: look beneath the video. For a more thorough description of how to add a Table of Contents to a YouTube video, check out this blog post I wrote (it is five years old, but is still pretty accurate!)

Tomorrow, I'll wrap up Media Resources Week by addressing other concerns instructors often have about creating and distributing videos.