Topic outline

  • Crowdsourcing of captions

    The law requires the video materials of the course to be captioned. Captions can also be helpful for learning. On this course, we will involve students in the captioning process. This page explains how captioning works.

    • Benefits of captions

      In addition to satisfying the accessibility requirements set by law, captions are useful for at least two different reasons:

      1. Captions can help comprehension even if you have no problems with hearing. They allow you pause the video and read what is being said thus allowing you more time to think. Captions also provide a secondary source of information in case that you miss something on the audio track.
      2. Captions can be easily turned into transcripts, which can be helpful if you want to review a content of a video or check a detail. See Course introduction (13:35), Uses of statistics (4:41),  Rauser (2014): Statistics without the agonizing pain (11:48), and Veritasium: Is most published research wrong (12:21) for example of a lecture video with transcript and a good description.

    • How captions are produced

      To get good captions for the course videos, we use crowdsourcing model where the students will check and fix the captions. All videos are initially captioned using either rev.com service, which uses native English speakers for captioning, or by YouTube automatic captioning, which are checked by master students. While this produces mostly correct captions, there there are basically three types of errors:

      1. Terminology errors. For example, a caption might say "recursion analysis" when the video talks about "regression analysis".
      2. Broken sentences. This refers to grammar problems, repeated words, etc. The course lectures are not scripted, but present as if in front a live class. This sometimes produces spoken language that look awkward in captions. In these cases, the caption should not be word for word the same with the spoken content but should be fixed so that the sentence is correct and communicates the meaning effectively. This might be difficult to do in some cases and if you cannot do and when this is the case, you can just email the instructor and say that there was a problem at a specific timepoints in a specific video and the instructor will take a look.
      3. Capitalization issues. Sometimes the video talks about journals such as Organizational Research Methods. These tend to be presented in lower case because the person who did the captions did not know that this is a proper noun.

    • Example of original and checked captions

      The table below show an example of what an original caption might look like and how it should look like after checking. The original captions were individual sentences or sentence are combined as meaningful paragraphs in the checked captions. Two grammatical errors are fixed and marked in bold red. (The transcripts do not need to be error free, but you should fix an error if you notice it.)

      Original captions Checked captions

      Let's take a look at this example that I'm going to be using in multiple videos.

      There is this Finnish Business Magazine called Talouselämä.

      And every year they publish Talouselämä 500 list

      which lists 500 largest Finnish companies and presents all

      kinds of analysis of those companies and how they did for the previous year.

      So it's followed by many reporters, and many people who follow, generally,

      Finnish business environment.

      In 2005, there was a big headline in one of the most prestigious Finnish newspapers

      that on this list, the women-led companies had 4.7 % points higher return on

      assets than those companies whose CEO was a man.

      Let's take a look at this example that I'm going to be using in multiple videos. There is this Finnish Business Magazine called Talouselämä. And every year they publish Talouselämä 500 list, which lists 500 largest Finnish companies and presents all kinds of analysis of those companies and how they did for the previous year. It's followed by many reporters, and many people who generally follow Finnish business environment.

      In 2005, there was a big headline in one of the most prestigious Finnish newspapers that on this list, the women-led companies had 4.7 % points higher return on assets than those companies whose CEO was a man.


    • Workflow for fixing captions

      Each student is assigned one or a few captions to check in each unit. To get started, provide your YouTube username and wait to get invited to be an editor on the YouTube channel. To do your assignments, do the following:

      1. Check your assignments from the list below.
      2. Click on the YouTube Studio link to get to the video editor.
      3. Write a short description of the content of the video. This should be a few sentences that explain the content and maybe some of the key takeaways. See Course introduction (13:35), Uses of statistics (4:41), Rauser (2014): Statistics without the agonizing pain (11:48), and Veritasium: Is most published research wrong (12:21) for examples.
      4. Switch to the caption editor and edit the captions as text. Some of the captions are just one large paragraph. Break these into smaller ones to proceed a more readable transcript. Other captions are just individual sentences or sentence-parts and should be combined as paragraphs. Then read the transcript and fix any errors that you note.
      5. Switch to timings mode and check that the caption timings work.
      6. Add a new entry to the submitted captions in Moodle and copy the captions text to the transcript field and the description text to the description field.
      7. Export the captions as a .vtt file from YouTube Studio and upload it to the new caption entry.
      8. Save the new entry and you are done. The course staff will move the captions from the submission box to the videos in a few days and will mark the caption done on the assignment list.

    • Screencast of the captioning workflow

      The screencast below demonstrates the captioning workflow. Note that if you notice errors in captions assigned to someone else, you can still fix them. If the person has not yet completed checking the captions, it is sufficient to fix the error on YouTube Studio. If the captions have been submitted already to the submission box below or are marked as completed, you can simply resubmit a fixed version and it will be updated by the course staff.




    • Captioning assignments

      Check your assignments below or using this Google sheets link

    • Additional resources on captioning videos

      The following resources (in Finnish) can be interesting for students who need to caption their own teaching videos at some point.

    • H5P icon
      Vitikainen: Yleisradion opit tekstitykseen | Ymmärrän 2020 (28:05, in Finnish) H5P
    • File icon
      A presentation about captioning for JSBE teaching development committee File
      Powerpoint 2007 presentation

      This presentation, in Finnish, contains Mikko's experiences on captioning lecture videos.

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