Why Closed Captions & Subtitles Are Important in eLearning

eLearning is becoming the norm in education. With students from all over the world having an equal chance to attend the same school online, it becomes necessary to accommodate every student’s needs and circumstances to establish a place where everyone can learn in the same pace. If you want to achieve that with your online classes, having eLearning closed captions is the way to go not only for your students but also for you. Here’s why you should consider adding closed captions and subtitles to your eLearning content.,

Motivate students

Before eLearning, students felt that sitting through long lectures was tedious, and they feel the same about lengthy recorded lectures. In fact, they may feel far less unmotivated to watch your videos all the way through because of:

• Muffled audio
• Hard to understand dialogue
• Complex terms
• Fast speech

Placing closed captions on your videos encourages your students to engage more with your materials. When they have the option to enable closed captions, they will be able to hear the important points and lessons more clearly and proceed along the videos a lot more smoothly

Plus, closed captions eliminate the need for students to wear headphones or be in a quiet room to listen to your videos. Your students will feel grateful that you consider their circumstances, and be even more motivated to watch your content.

Accommodate ESL students

An essential initiative of eLearning is being able to accommodate students from anywhere across the world while using English as the primary language in teaching. This means giving every student (regardless of country) equal opportunities to learn and eliminating language barriers that can hamper their learning.

Closed captions and subtitles are vital in pursuing this initiative. They allow ESL students to learn from English video content as smoothly as native English speakers. If there’s any dialogue that needs clarification, ESL students can search it up via the caption quickly.

For this purpose, it’s best to provide a downloadable text file containing a transcript for each video for quicker reference.

Increase accessibility

eLearning is a blessing to students with learning or hearing disabilities. Whereas students are expected to keep up with the teacher’s pace in the traditional classroom, students can pace themselves however they want in eLearning.

Closed captions and subtitles play a key role in self-paced learning. Students with disabilities will benefit greatly from understanding the lesson clearly thanks to captions, opening up eLearning as a true avenue for equal opportunity learning.

Content repurposing

Captioning eLearning videos often involves making a transcript. Besides making this a downloadable file for your students, you can repurpose this for various materials in the future, such as:

• Presentations
• Study guides
• Handouts
• Quizzes
• Midterm & final exams

Improve instruction style

Your closed captions and subtitles can also be beneficial to you when you create your future learning content. When you receive student feedback on your performance, your captioning can be a good reference point on how you can improve your content in a way that students can better learn from them.

For instance, if your students have a hard time understanding even with closed captions, chances are you may have to improve how you present and communicate the lessons in the content. Other factors that your closed captions can help you assess include:

• Teaching pace
• Sentence construction
• Audiovisual presentation

Making closed captions for eLearning content can be very taxing over time. Consider using TranscriptionWing to transcribe and caption your content for you.