Online courses are becoming increasingly popular as people want to learn new things but feel constrained by their work and schedules. However, most of the courses on the market are in English, so not everyone can access them.
Captions and translations make it easier for anyone to access your online course and create a much more inclusive learning environment.
There are many benefits to captioning and translation for an online course. They help people learn a new language online with the help of a video in an easy and fun way. They also make it easier for deaf and hard-of-hearing people.
Furthermore, for people on the go, impromptu language learners, and people who just got stuck in traffic, captions and translations can turn a boring online course into something very useful.
In this article, you will learn why captions and translations can make an online educational video course effective and more understandable.
1. Translation Can Open Up your Online Course to New International Markets
Open up your online course to new international markets.
Translation will make it easier for you to attract more students from different regions and increase your potential for profit. Using captions and translation for your online course means you are creating content for international markets.
Furthermore, translation improves the quality of your content by making it more accessible to a wider public.
Consequently, you will have wider audiences with better engagement rates, sharing more high-quality content on your platforms. Indeed, translation can open up your online course to new international markets.
Around 94% of the world doesn’t speak English as their primary language. Thus, the benefits of captions and translation go beyond simply making your course accessible or search-friendly in your current market.
2. Many People Learn Better When Captioning is Available
Learning with the spoken word can be challenging for some learners, especially those who are new to English or who have some language impediments. For such learners, another way to process and understand the content is necessary.
Adding captions to an online course is an excellent way to provide a learner with transcription and translation as support for their learning.
Captions are useful for all learners, however, not just for those with barriers to spoken communication.
Teachers also benefit from captioning because they can more easily share video content with students who may not speak English as their primary language.
3. It Encourages More Content Sharing And More Interaction
The more students interact with a captioned and translated video, the more likely they are to engage with the content by typing questions, comments, and reactions.
In particular, interactive captions allow students to make connections between what they hear and what they read, resulting in better comprehension.
Translations also allow students in multilingual classrooms to provide translations of words in their first language that they might not understand.
Lastly, by adding captions to your videos, you can increase accessibility and engagement by making videos easier to consume and enjoy.
Enabling this feature on your site opens up the opportunity to more effectively connect with learners of all backgrounds.
4. Captions Help with the Search Engine Optimization
Google is getting smarter. They have started using machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence to find out what relevant content is for the audience. With this, captions are extremely important to improve SEO for online courses.
SEO for online courses differs from SEO for articles. SEO for online courses helps you rank highly on Google, Bing, and other search engines.
One of the main reasons for this is translation. Online courses should be in multiple languages. Use courses in the language of your target audience. Another reason has to do with the benefits of captions.
Captions help people understand what they are learning.
Furthermore, it provides metadata information to search engines, thereby improving search engine rankings. It makes the viewers stay connected to you. And at the same time, it increases the click-through rate, gets a good ranking, and gets more views.
5. Students Who Have Difficulty Hearing or Understanding the Video Can Get a Better Education
Video of lectures and presentations is commonly provided to students as a supplement to their traditional classroom studies.
Unfortunately, students with hearing problems or those whose first language is not English often have difficulty understanding these videos. Captions and subtitles allow the student to read along while they watch the video, which helps their understanding.
Not only can captions and translation help students from afar, but it’s also a useful tool for students who have difficulty hearing or understanding the video content. When your video is captioned, your entire audience can read the subtitles along with the audio.
For videos that go much faster than people can type—such as lectures—audiences can even choose to see subtitles first and then listen along with the video. This allows them to understand the language and follow along much faster than just listening to the audio alone.
6. Improves Reading Skills and Fluency
Captions and translations are important in supporting multimodal learning. As learners progress from reading to writing, producing and editing subtitles is a terrific activity for developing reading skills and fluency.
Captions and translations can be useful tools for improving foreign language skills. We have seen students who used captions or translations to improve their English reading skills, even though they were native English speakers.
Non-native English speakers can use them to develop their vocabulary, practice pronunciation, and complete readings in another language.
While the research on reading comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary development is mixed, many studies have shown a positive improvement in these areas when children are exposed to captions and translation.
7. Caption and Translations Boost Motivation and Comprehension of Concepts
In a world where diverse audiences are demanding content in languages that suit their needs, incorporating captions and translations has become a significant factor for success.
By including these features in your course, you can ensure that your learners understand the underlying concepts and embrace new ideas.
The benefits of your online course extend beyond the English-speaking world, and you want to ensure that all students are just as engaged and motivated. Research shows that captions improve motivation and comprehension.
Improved captions improve comprehension further by offering the option for learners to select their preferred language, resulting in increased course completions.
Furthermore, offer a way to ensure that all your students are learning from your content. It also gives them another way to grasp the concepts, which may help keep them from being bored.
8. Captions and Translations Enhance Language Learning
One of the best ways to learn any language is through immersion, which means immersing yourself in the language by using it on a regular basis.
When you translate your course, you can achieve this by using captions while watching it start. This will allow you to understand and use the language as you watch.
Captions and translations are essential for students learning another language. Language learners can repeat words as much as they need to and at their own pace with machine captions and translations.
This makes the learning experience more like one-on-one tutoring than traditional classroom teaching, where the teacher’s pace is not easily changed.
9. Captioning Can Increase Student Engagement and Strengthen Knowledge Retention
When it comes to online courses, a certain level of student engagement is expected. After all, when you sit down to watch a video or audio recording in an educational setting, you’re committed to paying attention and learning the lessons at hand.
By adding captions to the same course materials and post-production videos, you can actually increase levels of student engagement and knowledge retention. It supports learning in noisy environments and offers insights into viewers’ preferences through subtitle-enabled viewing analytics.
Studies show that using captioning in the classroom can help improve knowledge retention in both students and teachers.
It is easier for students to pay attention to content when they do not have to spend time and effort trying to decipher what is being said. Therefore, they can pay attention to emotional and visual cues as well.
10. Captions Mean Visual Learners Can Follow Lessons Easily
Being able to see what the content is saying makes it easier to follow the course. This is important for younger students and people who have a difficult time reading. According to research on learning styles, visual learners are in the majority.
In fact, most people have more than one preferred learning style but tend to be stronger in one or two areas. Captioning your educational materials and/or translating them reaches out to the majority of learners. This is a truly inclusive strategy.
Visual learners remember what they see, so making the lecture content available in text or image format is one way to make it accessible. Captions also allow visual learners to keep up even when they can’t attend class.
11. Extra Income Through Transcription
Over the years, students who have spent time with our online courses have consistently provided feedback on how helpful they have been.
One positive outcome is that they have often been able to take it upon themselves to translate and caption the course into their language and then sell it for extra income.
The transcript itself can be a bonus, a great resource for students, and a benefit on its own. Some have even become full-time transcriptionists and earn more than their monthly salary in just a few working hours.
Making captions and translations of your online course material is a great way to earn extra income from your course.
Transcription services like Rev will pay you to create high-quality transcripts of speeches, video courses, interviews, or anything else audio-based.
FAQs
What is the difference between a caption and a translation?
Both captions and translations allow students to access content in a language other than English.
The difference between caption and translation: Captions refer to a transcript of what is being said in the video—either spoken by the voice-over or by the people in the video.
Translation refers to the transcription and translation of what’s being spoken, providing subtitles in another language.
What is the best way to integrate automatic captions into an online course?
One of the best ways to integrate automatic captions into an online course is to use the speech-to-text (STT) functions available in your presentation software. There are several reasons why you might want to do this.
For example, if you’re showing a lot of pictures and graphics in your videos, you might consider using speech recognition to make your presentations more accessible.
If you’re also sharing slides with others, such as a study group or class, having subtitles added automatically could help cut down on confusion between what’s being said and what’s being displayed on the screen.
Final Thoughts
Captions can be beneficial in many different ways. For people learning a language, captions and translation allow them to understand the dialogue of the video without having to pay attention to what is being said.
In addition, captions aid in maintaining tone in audio where it may not come through in the dialog or with the sound effects.
Captions and translations for an online course allow for ease of use for those that are deaf or hard of hearing and need visual enrichment in order to understand the content and dialog.
Finally, with captions and translation, there is an increased engagement level on the part of the learners as they are able to stay focused on the topic at hand during playback as well as re-play several times because they are able to pause and access captions.
You now know the importance of captions and translation for your online course. However, there is no point in having captions for training videos that people won’t watch. Thus, it is equally important to learn how to create training videos that people will watch.
Thanks so much for reading.
