Quick-start guide

7.4. Adding a video and transcript to your Moodle book

A good way of enhancing your course content is to add a video.

For storage reasons, rather than uploading videos into your Moodle book you need to embed them from the site that they're on. In order to embed a video you'll need to copy its embed code from where it's hosted.

On a video platform like YouTube or TED the embed code can be found as one of the options when you click on the Share button on the video's page. The embed code is a string of HTML code that you can copy from the video platform.

Then you need to paste it into your Moodle book.

To do this, click on the Show more buttons icon in the Content field. 

This reveals an extra row of buttons. Click on the HTML icon. 

This shows the text in your Moodle book in HTML view. A paragraph of text will be tagged with '<p>' and '</p>' at the beginning and end, for example.

Scroll down to the point in the text where you want to add the video and paste in the embed code. 

Click on the HTML icon again and the view will switch back to the regular view of the text, with the video embedded in the page in a media player.

Your video may already have subtitles. If any of your learners are unable to listen to the video it's best practice to add a transcript of what is said. 

To add a transcript, click again on the HTML icon and scroll down to where you embedded the video. Hit the Enter key on your keyboard to create a blank line in the code. 

Copy the following code and paste it onto the blank line:

<details>
<summary><strong>Transcript</strong></summary>
<br>
<p>This is the first paragraph of the transcript.</p>
<p>This is the second paragraph of the transcript.</p>
<p>This is the third paragraph of the transcript.</p>
<hr>
</details>

Then you'll need to add the transcript itself. 

As you can see, we've added three paragraphs with placeholder text at the end of the code. This is where your transcript will go. 

• If you have a transcript and it's already arranged into paragraphs you just need to add '<p>' and '</p>' to the beginning and end of each paragraph and paste them over the placeholder text.
• If you're relying on an automatically generated transcript (from YouTube, for example), note that you will probably need to carefully edit it to make sure that the text is accurate and makes sense. It needs to be easy to read: several lines from an automatically generated transcript should be combined into one paragraph and you will need to make sure that the timing codes are removed. 

Once you're happy that your video and transcript are in place, click on the Save changes button and confirm that they've been added to the course correctly. 

So you've completed your Moodle book. Now let's move on to adding resources to your course.