How to disable video transcripts by default?

Educators Instructional Design
1

Our instructors would like for video transcripts to be disabled by default (and let the users opt into watching them), rather than vice-versa. Is there some global setting which can change “show transcripts” to false, so that instructors don’t need to edit this on the dozens of videos they add to new classes?

2

Hi @knoise ,

Yes you can! If you Edit the video component and go to the Advanced tab, there’s an option called “Show Transcript”:

show transcript
show transcript751×609 46 KB

Set that to False to hide the transcript sidebar by default.

But note – if you’ve already toggled the transcript on or off manually for any video, then a cookie is stored which preserves this setting, and so that will control whether you see transcripts by default for any future videos.

See Specifying Additional Video Options for more details.

3

By “disabled by default” I meant that I’d like to set my platform to default to “Show transcript” = false. Is there a setting for that? I’d basically like all instructors to never have to deal with it. (It’s also my experience that it doesn’t stay this way after setting it on one video, but I can double check that.)

4

Sorry, there isn’t a global setting for this.

Could you post back here when you have checked this? It works for me, but it would be good to have this verified.

5

I recorded a video showing that that setting doesn’t stick

I was using Google Chrome non-incognito on Ubuntu

6

How does one make a feature request for such a thing?

7

Ah… my miscommunication, sorry. What I meant was, there is a setting that sticks for learners who decide to turn transcripts on/off. It sets a cookie, which is respected for all videos, across all courses on a given Open edX site. There isn’t a setting for educators adding videos to courses.

That’s a harder question, unfortunately… Open edX is run by edx.org, but accepts contributions from the community, and there are several different organizations (including mine, OpenCraft) that make contributions to the platform (see Open edX Service Providers).

But we don’t yet have a centralized way to request features, or to offer bounties for their development.

Searching for “feature requests” on this forum produced this most recent suggestion, and you’ve already posted here, so maybe ask your service provider?

8

Hello @knoise,

You can set it to false by default on the below-mentioned loc:

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9

Thanks for the pointer. That is possibly viable. Though since I use Tutor and it wraps things in Kubernetes, that’s much easier said than done. I’ll look into how to change the Kubernetes image though.

10

Is there something I likely need to do to force this to be utilized?

I was able to edit the file in Tutor as follows:
1. tutor local run lms bash
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get -y install vim
4. vim ./common/lib/xmodule/xmodule/video_module/video_xfields.py

But then I saw no change to the behavior when creating video components. They still defaulted to the transcript being true. So I did “tutor local quickstart” to restart everything but that didn’t help either, the behavior’s still the same.

11

I just noticed in Django that there’s something called “Course video transcript enabled flags”. Is that something which also controls this setting? I.e. could I set it to false and it would disable this?

12

Unfortunately no – disabling this flag removes/hides transcripts from all your videos (or per-course, if it’s flagged like that). Learners would not be able to see any transcripts if this was turned off.

13

OK, Regis eventually said here:

that it’s not possible to actually make changes like this in video_xfields.py inside the container without fully forking open edx and building it into the container :neutral_face:. So it looks like I’m stuck waiting to see if anyone ever picks up my JIRA ticket.

14

I am using Native Koa version but changing show_captions to False and rebooting lms and cms did nothing for me.

Every LMS a page with video has errors in console:
Blocked loading mixed active content “http:///yt_video_metadata?id=”
GET https://@video+block@/handler/transcript/translation/en?videoId=
[HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found 558ms]
[Video info]: ERROR while fetching captions.
[Video info]: STATUS: error, MESSAGE: Not Found

15

PS: All that said, we (at Opencraft) are actively looking into opening a community wish/bounty list, where such requests could go. It’ll be no guarantee that things will get done, but at the very least it’ll be easy to see what Open edX currently lacks.

(Which also makes me think we’ll want a voting system of some sort to gauge interest - in addition for the ability to offer money to the developer that takes it on, of course.)

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