Why You Should Use YuJa for Your Videos

As you know, the college has its own kinda YouTube platform: YuJa (which you can access at cod.yuja.com, with your COD login and password).

I would like to make the case that you should use it as video hosting platform.

First, YouTube is a cesspool, and like most Big Tech companies, Alphabet has gotten, well, not great, and by that, I mean, evil. You may take all the necessary precautions to make sure that your videos have the right privacy settings and all, but YT still owns what you put there. Personally, I use it as little as I can. And its recommender algorithm is so bad that every time I go there, this is what I do:

That’s right. Most of my time on YT is spent telling it not to recommend the channels it thinks I will want to watch. It’s wrong almost 100% of the time. And no matter how many times I do this, the next time I log in, there will be another endless page of crappy recommendations.

There is also ample research on the radicalization pipeline.

You could not pay me to put my content there, nor am I willing to make my students go there, not even if I give them a direct link or embed a video in my course so they don’t have to actually go to the YT site.

There are, of course, other, better, platforms. Personally, I have been using vimeo for a long time, but it is not free.

Second, there is the video production side. I will cope to the irony that I am recommending YuJa to you for production when I don’t use it. I have used Camtasia for decades now but I do understand that many of us don’t need the whole armada of features that Camtasia offers. For most of us, YuJa is sufficient.

Third, it’s not great to upload a video directly into Blackboard. We don’t have unlimited storage there, and video files can be notoriously ginormous. We do not have such restrictions on YuJa. And it is generally better to embed, or, use the YuJa LTI.

Fourth, in YuJa, you get the automatic captioning (yes, you have it in YT as well, but it’s bad). I will note again that auto-captioning has improved a lot over the years, but for those of us with accents, auto-captioning often gets very funky results. Personally, I use another Techsmith product, Audiate, that allows me to generate captions that I can edit like a document, clean up the audio, and generate a nice caption file that I can upload to YuJa or somewhere else. But I have no doubts that the rest of you have perfect elocution but if you don’t, you can edit your captions in YuJa.

Fifth, YuJa comes with a whole bunch of features that you might find useful, such as the ability to insert quiz questions into a video and have that connected to your gradebook in Blackboard.

Sixth, YuJa will also allow you to create folders and playlist to organize your video collection.

How to get started? Well, you can start by recording basic videos using the YuJa recorder. Log in to YuJa and click on Create Recording:

If this is your first time recording a video using YuJa, you will need to download and install the YuJa Software Capture module. When prompted, click Download:

Pro-tip: I downloaded the installer without problem, but I had to restart my computer for the installation to run. Once you’ve completed the installation, you’re almost ready to start your first recording. This is what the interface looks like:

I would recommend not bothering with the top right set of menus. Note that you can give your video a title and decide in which folder to save it before you even start recording. The main pane will tell you which video inputs are available to you. My webcam was off, that’s why the left side screen is black. The right side shows my screen recording input.

More interesting are the options on the left-hand side of the app.

The video options show you what inputs are available, integrated webcam, other webcam, different screens, etc.

The audio options do the same, with the drop-down menu showing you which audio input are available with your configuration.

The screen options allow you to toggle an optional annotation toolbar that you can position anywhere on your screen, to use during your recording to annotate what you are doing.