TRANSCRIPT OF SAKAI FOR INSTRUCTORS: HOW TO ADD MULTIMEDIA TO A SUBPAGE

Adding multimedia, such as videos, to your Lessons in Sakai can be a great way to help 
students conceptualize your content. Videos can also help you build a connection with your 
students and foster communication when you use them to introduce yourself and your 
course at the beginning of the semester. 

When deciding to add videos to your Sakai site, you’ll need to ensure they are available 
to all of your students. One of the ways you can do that is by using videos that are 
already captioned. In this video, we’ll talk about how to find captioned videos on 
YouTube and how to embed or display them in Sakai.

So, what are captions?

When watching a video or television program, captions are the words that appear, 
generally, at the bottom of the screen and are a text-based, synchronous representation 
of the video’s audio content. They include spoken words as well as any other relevant 
sounds that are important to a viewer’s understanding of the content, such as music and 
sound effects. 

YouTube, a popular video-hosting platform, provides a filter that makes it easy to find 
captioned videos. 

Let’s head over to YouTube.com to find a video for this week’s lesson. 
In YouTube’s search field, I’ll type a few words to help YouTube locate videos on my 
topic, and then I’ll click the Search button. 

A number of uncaptioned and captioned videos appear. I want to narrow this list to 
display only captioned videos, so I’ll click Filter and under Features, I’ll select 
Subtitles/CC. 

There we go. 

I can tell these videos are captioned because the letters CC, meaning Closed Captioned, 
appear under each of their descriptions. 

Once you’ve selected a video, we recommend watching it with the captions on to verify 
they're accurate. 

Questions you can ask yourself are: 

Is there punctuation and capitalization? 

Are academic terms spelled correctly? 

We’ll start the video and click the CC icon, here, in the video player’s control panel 
to turn on the captions, 

[Player control from left to right is: Play button, volume control, elabpsed time, 
duration of video, CC icon, settings.]

and I’ll review them for accuracy. If the video’s not captioned well, select an 
alternative video.

[fades out, then back in to simulated time advancement]

This video’s captions look great! Let’s embed it in this week’s subpage. 

Under the video player, I’ll click Share and then Embed. A few lines of code appear. 
Click Copy and the code copies to the computer’s clipboard. 

We’ll return to Sakai by clicking the tab here at the top of the screen. 

[A Lessons subpage in Sakai appears]

Let’s embed the video under Activities and Assessment. Click Add Content and select 
Embed content on page. In the Add a URL or “embed code” field, paste the copied embed 
code, and click Save and then Save again. 

The video appears on the subpage.

It’s also a good idea to provide the video’s URL, just in case the embedded one doesn’t 
display. That way, students can copy and paste it into their browser. Click Add Content 
and select Add Text. I’ll add a note that instructs students to go to this URL to view 
the video and Save.

Finally, I’ll add a transcript for this video. 

A video’s transcript is a text document that contains all of the video’s audio content, 
such as the captions and other sound notations. It can be created in a word processor 
such as Notepad or Word. Transcripts are not only useful to students who use certain 
assistive technologies, but they are also a great way for many students to review the 
video’s content. 

If you make your own videos, we recommend first writing a script. It’ll help keep you 
focused as you record, and you can use it to caption your video and use it as the 
transcript.

In Sakai, I’ll click Add Content and select Add Content Links. In the Item Name field, 
I’ll type a descriptive name for the transcript that includes the video’s title so that 
students know it belongs with the video, such as Video Transcript of How to Separate 
Fact and Fiction Online, and I’ll indicate which type of file it is, in this case, it’s 
a text file. 

Then, I’ll click Choose Files to upload my transcript.

[fade]

The transcript appears.

Okay, I think you’re ready to search for and add a video to a subpage. When looking for 
videos for your class, another great resource with a large repository of captioned 
videos is Durham Tech library’s online video collection, Films on Demand. 

[Durham Tech home page displaying Library resources. Under Research Tools, clicking 
Online Video Resources. A new page loads. Clicking Films on Demand link. Films on Demand 
loads. Clicking the Advanced Search link. Search fields appear.]

It provides nearly 30,000 videos in many subject areas and is an excellent alternative 
to YouTube. 

If you need assistance, please contact sakaihelp@durhamtech.edu.