Amara.org Support Center

Hi, Qin Qin

You should ask Udemy whether their player supports Closed Caption (CC) subtitles, i.e. a time-coded text file that gets synchronized with the video by the player to produce the subtitles seen on it. If the Udemy player does, then you could make the subtitles on Amara, download them and add them to the Udemy-hosted video.

Other question for Udemy support: can the Amara embed code be used in the "other materials" part of Udemy courses? If yes, then you could simply embed the subtitled Amara video there.

However, there seems to be a further problem: in order to create a subtitling page on Amara.org  from a video in the normal, basic way, the video must be freely viewable online. And from what I saw of even a "free" Udemy course, the videos there are not: you need to be logged in to view them. Hence you cannot create an Amara subtitling page from their Udemy URL in this normal, basic way.

Nevertheless, this obstacle might perhaps be overcome if you choose an Amara Enterprise, paying, solution. But I don't know much about the enterprise services: you should contact them.

Sorry I can't help you better,

Claude

 

Qin Qin,

Thank you for your interest in subtitling with Amara.org.

Please feel very welcome to fill out the form at http://pro.amara.org/choose-enterprise. Our staff will reach out to you and explain in detail what options are available for organizing and coordinating crowdsourced subtitling and how they can help you reach your goals.

Best,

Margarita Shamraeva

Amara.org

Thank you, Margarita - I wasn't sure what happened when one filled the form.

 

Hi Qin Qin

Yikes! I just found a question about closed captions in Udemy's support:

Edmund Lee — Aug 24, 2014 09:42PM PDT
How do I add closed captions to videos?

Reply:

Che Harvey Udemy Agent Aug 27, 2014 01:07PM PDT
Hey Edmund,
Thanks for reaching out! At the moment, close captioning is being transcribed within Udemy. It’s a new feature that we’ve added to the site, and currently we are selecting only a handful of courses to try it out on. If all goes well, we will begin rolling the feature out to all instructors.

That rules out making your own subtitles on Amara and then reusing them in Udemy. And it doesn't sound too promising anyway. In fact, back on July 17, 2014, Udemy people were claiming that they were "adding captions to around 100 courses per month"  But if you now apply the "Closed Caption Available" search result filtering they described there, by first selecting a category, the result confirms Che Harvey's "we are selecting only a handful of courses to try it out on" at the end of August: presently, there are only 20 closed captioned courses on their platform, for all categories (1).

So pardon my bluntness, please, but do you really need to keep your course's videos private? if not, there are other video hosting platforms where you could publish them publicly, and then subtitle them normally with Amara. And then you could upload them again, uncaptioned, in Udemy, but link to the captioned Amara version in the description

(1) I.e. for each category:

3 CCed courses for Development
1 CCed courses for Business
1 CCed courses for IT & Software
2 CCed courses for Office Productivity
4 CCed courses for Personal Development
3 CCed courses for Design
0 CCed courses for Marketing
1 CCed courses for Lifestyle
2 CCed courses for Photography
1 CCed courses for Health & Fitness
1 CCed courses for Teacher Training
0 CCed courses for Music
1 CCed courses for Academics
0 CCed courses for Language
0 CCed courses for Test Prep

 

 Hi Qin Qin 

Closed captions are supported by Udemy. But from Che Harvey's "close captioning is being transcribed within Udemy", it seems that they want to control it entirely.

However yes, do get in touch with them, please - and it would be great if you refered their reply here too, because other Udemy users might share your wish to make captions themselves.

Best,

Claude