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Creating a Lesson from a YouTube Video

Introduction

In this page, I'll walk you through creating a lesson based on a YouTube video. We will do so using a lesson master, but we will also show how you can edit the profile for a media item to use a YouTube video, in case you aren't using a lesson master.

If you are just looking for some quick key info, it's simply that you create a normal JTLanguage lesson with at least a media item, but in your media item profile, you set the "Player Source" field to "YouTube", and put the video ID in the "Pattern/URL/YouTube ID" field. Note that there is a "Player Source" field in the control master too, if you want to create a lesson master for it, but of course you have to set the YouTube ID for the individual media items.

Prerequisites

This guide assumes some familiarity with creating a course and lessons in JTLanguage, and that you already have a course to add the lesson too. If you haven't already done so, I recommend reading:

Creating a Course

This guide also assumes some familiarity with setting up a lesson master. If you haven't already done so, I recommend reading:

Creating a Lesson Master

In creating your own lessons based on your YouTube videos, you'll of course have needed to know how to create the video files and uploaded them to YouTube. You will reference the videos by their YouTube video ID, so you will need to obtain these IDs from the YouTube link to the video. We'll explain this later.

Lesson Design

We'll have our example lesson be about a list of some vocabulary words and example sentences using the vocabulary. Therefore, our lesson will have a video media content item set up to reference an existing YouTube video, and Words and Sentences study list content items. We are not required to map the video any to study lists, but we will show you how to do so, such that the study lists will have audio segments associated with the study items that come indirectly from the video, without you needing to do any copying and pasting of audio segments. This also sets up subtitles and the text list tracking when playing the video in the JTLanguage media player.

We'll use a lesson master to create our lesson, but the process requires editing the video media item profile to reference the YouTube video ID. This is the same information you would need to set up the media item without a lesson master as well.

Setting up the Video Media Item Content Master

Let's assume you are creating a lesson master with a video lesson media content item, and words and sentences study list content items. In creating the video lesson media content master item, you set the content type to "Video" and the subcontent type to something like "Lesson", or whatever the main purpose of the video is.

Only two other fields in the media item content profile need to be changed from the defaults. One is that we uncheck the "Generate file name" checkbox (this probably is not even needed), and the other is that we set the "Player source" drop-down menu to "YouTube". This is the main field that indicates that our media item will reference a YouTube video.

In our particular example, we will have our media item associated with Words and Sentences study lists, so we will change the "Source component keys" field to "Words, Sentences". (For some unknown reason, in creating the YouTube video I'm using for an example, I recited the sentences first and then the words. Usually my vocabulary lessons start with the words. The order doesn't really matter, but the subtitles and text list tracking will jump to the sentences first, and then go to the words in this case, as I listed the study lists in reverse order.)

The video media item content master page will look something like this once it is filled in:

Editing or the video media item content master.

The Words and Sentences study list content master items are created normally, with no special settings.

Setting up the Video Media Content Item

Once we've created our lesson referencing the master we've created, or if we are creating the media content item manually, we need to set up the YouTube video ID. Either from the "Edit media profile" link on the media player page for the content item, or from the "Edit lesson content" page "Edit profile" button, or from adding a new content item, go to the media item profile page. Here's my example's page after I set it up:

Editing the video media item profile.

If not already set, the "Player Source" field should be set to "YouTube". Then we put the YouTube video ID into the "Pattern/URL/YouTube ID" field.

We get the video ID from the URL of the YouTube video. For example, if the URL for the YouTube video is of the form:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYOA4tAcNf4

the video ID is the "DYOA4tAcNf4" part after the "v=". If the URL is of the form:

https://youtu.be/DYOA4tAcNf4

the video ID is the value after the last '/'.

We click "Save" to save our changes.

At this point, if we go to the media player page, the YouTube video will be set up to play. However, we haven't mapped the media to the text yet.

Mapping the Media to the Text

Actually, there is no difference in doing the mapping for a YouTube video media item than for a normal audio or video media item. Internally, the Map Media page (like the media player) has been coded to use the YouTube control interface to control the video, such that the playback controls function in the same matter. Another difference handled internally, is that when you first go to the Map Media page, JTLanguage will extract the audio from the YouTube video and save it on the server as a ".mp3" file. You will probably notice a small delay for this the first time you go to the Map Media page.

In my example, because I reversed the order of the words and sentences list in the video with respect to the order I listed them in the "Source component keys" field, when mapping, I need to first click on the first item of the "Sentences" and "Words" study items listed in the "Text" field set, when doing the mapping.

The "YouTube Lesson" Example

For an alternate lesson format example, check out the "YouTube Lesson" lesson in the "Example" course I provided. In this example, I included a "Text" content item in addition to the "Words" and "Sentences" content items. The Text content item will actually be a transcript of the whole video, so I could have subtitles managed by JTLanguage. The Text and Words content items will be mapped directly to the video. For the Sentences content item, I used the "Extract" export format to copy just the sentence items to the Sentences study list.

Therefore, in creating this video, the mapping process was a little different. I directly mapped all the Text content with respect to the "Text" items in the Text list box, which included the words from the words study list, and then I had to map the same audio to the "Words" text in the Text list box. Alternatively, I could have just copied the Words study items as well, using the "Extract" export mechanism, or the copy and paste mechanism of the text edit pages.

For information on using the "Extract" export mechanism, please see the following help page:

Using the Extract Import/Export Format

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