In the video above, we’ll cover
- An overview of the YuJa platform
- How to record a video using YuJa
- How to share your videos to your module channel
- How to make your video accessible
1 Access YuJa
Before we go into the overview of the platform, let’s find where YuJa is in your module. In modules with the default template, you can find the link to YuJa below “Library Resources” in with the title “Video Channel (YuJa)”. This may be in a different place in your module depending on your school or discipline’s template. However, you can also always find YuJa by going into the left-hand “Details & Actions” panel, clicking on the link for “External Apps” and then clicking on YuJa: Channel.
It’s important that the very first time you go into YuJa it is from a module page because this will send YuJa the information that you are an instructor/staff member and give you a higher quota by default.
Every time you have a new module, you should also open YuJa from your module page as this action creates the “channel” for your module. A YuJa “Channel” just means the area for the videos for a specific module.
Once you’ve opened YuJa, you’ll see the channel’s page if you opened it in your module, or your personal media page if you opened YuJa directly from the URL. We’ll go to the URL now, but the interface is the same wherever you open it!
The URL is video.dundee.ac.uk , but remember only log into this directly after you have accessed YuJa directly from your My Dundee module.
You’ll need to use the Login button at the top right-hand side of the screen, and then you’ll go through the typical Single-Sign On process.
2 Platform Overview
Let’s go over some of the basics of using the platform before we show you how to record a video! At the top of the screen we can see two buttons in the middle – Manage Media and Create Recording. If you click “Manage Media”, it will bring you back to your “My Media” area, which is the collection of all of your videos. We’ll cover the “Create Recording” shortly, so we’ll skip this for now.
Right now, we are in the Personal section in the “My Media” area. We’ll come back to this left-hand panel later, but for now let’s take a look at the options in this area.
When you are in this screen, you can see the option for “New folder”. To create a new folder, simply click this link and title the folder. It can be useful to name folders by year and module. This will also be helpful later when you are trying to find a video or if you remove or archive old content. To move any videos to this new folder, simply drag and drop the video into the desired folder. If you have multiple videos you’d like to move, hold down CTRL while you click on the videos you want to select. Videos that are selected have a blue outline around them, then (while still holding CTRL) simply click on the last video you want to include and drag and drop them to the folder.
Next to the “New Folder” link is a link to upload a video – you can see this in action in our session on uploading videos from PowerPoint recordings.
The next button is to “go back”, this just allows you to backtrack easily without using your browser’s back button. After that is more actions, we’ll come back to this later when we want to do things like publish the video or add it to your module page.
Now, let’s go back to that left-hand menu. Below this you can see an area where you can see videos shared with you. At the time of recording, the favourites section currently is only for documents or images that you have uploaded. As YuJa is meant as a video repository, and we don’t recommend uploading images or document files here, you can ignore this for now.
In the next section, “Shared”, you can see areas that are more publicly available. The “Public” area will show folders that users have made fully publicly available.
Below this, you can see additional shared folders that are shared across the university.
Finally, you can see an option called “Channels” – this is where you can find the areas for your modules. If I click on this link, I can see the modules I have access to where a YuJa channel has been set up. There is also a magnifying glass so you can search for your module – we strongly recommend searching by your Module ID rather than module title, as it’s easy to enter the title slightly wrong and have nothing appear in your search!
When you go into one of these channels, you can see any folders that have been created as well as the videos that have been published to the course. If you open a channe you can see that the options along the top row are similar, but not quite identical. The option for a “New Sub-channel” is just an option to set up a folder. The “Add Resource” option is new – this allows you to pull videos from your collection or the public pages directly to your module channel.
Now that we’ve gotten a feel for YuJa’s interface, let’s look at how to record a video from within YuJa. Although there are many similarities for this session on YuJa and our videos on Hybrid teaching, these each do have different workflows and best practice suggestions. If you are looking for our guidance on Hybrid teaching, check out our videos and guides that we’ll link to below!
3 Recording a Video
Click on the Create Recording button at the top of the page – if this is your first time using YuJa, you’ll need to click this link to Download and install the program by following the instructions that will appear on your screen.
Once you’ve got it downloaded, you can click “Start” and it will open up the app that allows you to record on your computer.
Once it opens, you’ll see a few options across the top and the left-hand side. Let’s start with the top row. First, you should enter a title for your video. You can change this later if you need to. Next, you can add a description if you would like. After that, you’ll see a share media icon. If you click this, you’ll see a list of the module channels you have access to. If you’d like to directly publish your video to one of those destinations, including any folders you may have set up already, you can set that now. Otherwise, the video will save only to your My Media area by default.
Now, on the left-hand side of the screen, you have several drop-down menu options. The first one is the video, and you can which sources you want to use if you have multiple sources. If you’d like to turn off the video and only record your screen, you can toggle this video off.
Below that, you have the option for your microphone source, just like you did for your video source.
Below that, you can select what screen you want to use. If you have two monitors, you can go into Advanced Settings to look at your options. You will need to make a selection and click “Save” to see the changes in the main area, unlike for the video drop-down which changed the source as you selected it. You also have the option to record a selected area of your screen, so if you want to remove the bottom bar, or have your notes on the side of your screen, you can select around that! Just make sure any window you open or use doesn’t go beyond the boundary that you select here.
Next is the option for Live Streaming and finally the option for Profile. You ought to leave these as default of “No” for streaming, and “Current” for profile. If you have any questions about live-streaming with YuJa, please let us know at Help4U and we can work with you to see if YuJa is the right tool for what you are trying to do.
Once you’ve got these options set up correctly, you can click “Start”. Once you’ve started recording, you can minimise this window, so you won’t record a recording of your screen! You’ll still have the ability to pause and finish the recording, even when this window is minimised.
Now, at the bottom right-hand side of my screen, you will have the YuJa logo, and next to that is a pause button. You can use this to pause and resume my recording. After that is a red square button – this will end the recording. Once you’ve ended your recording, you have the option to delete it, save it, or publish it if you set up where to publish it earlier. When you save it, it will automatically begin processing wherever you told it to be saved.
If you deleted the video and you want to record again, you can click on the Start Recording button from the YuJa page. However, as the app is now open, you can also bring it up again from your computer. On a Windows, this means going into the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, clicking the up arrow, and clicking on the YuJa icon.
If you have saved the video, you will now see this video processing in your My Media collection area. This can take a bit of time to process, especially if you have a longer video! We’ll take a look at one of the already-processed videos to see how you can manage your video.
When you hover over a video, you will see a menu appear on the right-hand side of the video. The options in this menu are:
- Play
- Share
- Publish
- Delete
- Edit
- More
These are each really useful, but let’s start by editing the video as there may be bits at the beginning and end you want to trim. This video will just cover how to do this, but you should also review the Learning X series on “Making Effective Videos for Education”. We’ll provide the link to this below!
4 Editing a Video
Click on the option to edit, and we’ll show you how to trim your video.
First, the video is at the top, and you can play, pause and rewind from these controls. That will be key to see how some of our edits work, so you’ll want to keep an eye on this section as one you’ll return to throughout.
Next, we’ve got this bottom section that has the waveform (audio), the primary screen, and any captions. This is where you’ll do the cutting.
If you want to cut the beginning of this video, the easiest thing is to play until the point you want to start, and then press pause all from the top controls.
Once you’re at the point you want to start at, press the scissors icon and hover backwards in this bottom area to the start of the video. You probably pressed pause a second or so after you actually wanted the video to start, so you’ll want to play this back to see if you have the cut point in correctly. To check this, move the playback controls at the top back at the beginning and press play. If you did get it a bit wrong, you can hover over the grey cutting area in the bottom section, and at the right edge, click when it has the double arrows and move it slightly to the left (starting the video earlier). You may need to repeat this process a few times until you’ve got it exactly where you want it.
If you want to scrap the cut and start over, you can hover over the grey area to be cut and click on the x – that will remove the cut.
You can repeat this process for every section you want to cut out of your video – you don’t need to do anything your save your file between cuts.
Once you’ve got all of your cuts in, go up to the top and click save. After you’ve clicked “Save”, you can change the title – it will default to adding underscore edited to the video title to help differentiate between the original and the one you’ve just edited.
You can also decide if you want to automatically adjust captions, or re-request auto captions for the video. We’ll cover editing captions shortly, but for now we’ll move on to saving the file.
You will need to decide if you want to replace the existing video or save as a new video. Until you’re comfortable with this process, it may be a good idea to save it with the edited title and save as a new video. This means you’ve still got the original, un-edited video in your media files if you realise you made any mistakes and need to change anything you may have cut out. Once you’re happy with the new video, you should delete the original and re-title the new one to remove the Edited note.
5 Make Your Video Accessible
To make sure your video is accessible, you may need to edit your captions and transcript. If you edit your captions from the video editor, your transcript will update automatically, so this is the workflow we will cover here.
Hover over the video and click on the option for “Edit” to go back into the video editor. Then, click on the “cc” button to the right of the player settings. This will open up a time-stamped list of all of the captions. To edit this, you can click into a box and make any changes necessary.
You can also use the search tool in the top right-hand side of this captions menu to search for specific words, and even use find and replace. For instance, if there is a word you’ve used a few times in your video and you notice that the transcript consistently changes it to another word – you can search for the incorrectly transcribed word and even automatically replace it with the correct word. We do advise taking care when you use the replace as you don’t want to remove any correct uses of that word in the video.
Just as when you were editing your video, click save and decide if you want to create a new file or override the old one.
Now, let’s go to the video and take a look at the difference in transcript versus captions.
I’ll click “Play” and click on the “cc” at the bottom of the screen to turn on the captions. If I click on this “Show Transcript” button below the video, it will open a new side panel with the transcript.
Now that your video is edited and accessible, you’re ready to share it!
6 Sharing and Publishing Your Video
There are three main ways to share your video – directly to your module channel, embedded within your module content, and as a link.
6.1 Adding your video to your channel
We’ll start with adding it to your module as that is easiest, and it helps ensure accurate analytics for the video views for the cohort in the module. We won’t cover analytics in this guide, but you can see more information on this in the link below.
Hover over the video you want to go into your module and click on the link for Publish. You can then scroll to find your module, or you can use the search bar to find your module. Click wherever you want your video to be added, and you’ll see it included in the list at the bottom that says “Selected channels”. This does mean you can publish your video to multiple modules at once if you want! Once you’re done, click “Select” and that’s it! When your students go to the YuJa page in your module, they will be able to watch the video.
6.2 Sharing a direct link
Next, let’s take a look at sharing a link to the video directly. This is useful if you want to share your video outside of a module, or outside of My Dundee entirely as anyone with the link can access the video.
To do this, hover over the video of your choice and select the “More” option. Go into the fourth menu item from the top called “Links”. Here you can copy the link directly for sharing, or you can copy the embed code if you want to add the video somewhere with HTML.
6.3 Embedding the video in your content
The final way we’ll go over sharing content will be from your module page. You will have your main Video Channel link here, but you may want videos to appear in a weekly Learning Module. To do that, go down to the Learning Module where you want to embed the video. Click the down arrow on the right to open this, and hover over the line where you would like the video to be added and click on the purple plus sign that appears. From that menu, select External Apps. Scroll down to the bottom because the External Apps area is alphabetical, and you will see two options for YuJa. The first, “YuJa: Channel” would create a link to the whole YuJa channel, so you don’t want that one. What you want is “YuJa: Embed Media” because this will let you select one single video instead of the whole channel.
This will show you the videos in your Personal My Media collection, so you can either choose one from this screen, or use the search bar to find a specific video. You can select as many videos as you would like by clicking on them – selected videos have a blue outline around them. To unselect a video, simply click on it again. Once you’ve got the video or videos that you want to add here, you can click the link at the bottom right for Insert Content.
What is important to note is that these videos are only added in this spot – they are not also added to the module’s channel. This is useful if you want to restrict access to videos by date, as you can set up release conditions for these specific items or this area as a whole, but it could negatively impact the analytics if you want find out how many users in just this module have viewed the video.
7 Final Tips
One last thing we want to cover is how to delete your videos. This is handy for not only when you want to delete content you don’t need anymore, but also to reassure you about how intentional the act of deleting is – you are very unlikely to delete something accidentally in YuJa!
If you go to a video from a module’s channel and hover over it, your options here to remove the video are limited to “Unpublish”. So you cannot delete a video if you are in a module channel, the most you can do is remove it from the channel. Whoever owns the video will still have it in their personal media collection.
If you go to your personal media collection and find a video you do want to delete, you can hover over it and click on the menu option for “Delete.” After you do that, you have pop-up warning you that you are deleting content. However, this one is a bit different because you have to type in the word “Confirm” before you can delete it. So if you have any anxiety about deleting colleagues’ content, don’t worry, it is much tricker to do this on accident in YuJa than just about anywhere else!
References
- Hybrid teaching information
- Making Effective Videos for Education (Learning X)
- Video Analytics – guide from YuJa
- University of Dundee Policy and Guidelines on the Recording of Lectures
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