Sonoma State University

YuJa

YuJa is SSU's current solution for instructional video. Faculty can use YuJa to prerecord instructional videos, insert multiple-choice quizzes into videos, caption videos for accessibility, and receive video-format assignments from their students.

Best Practices

  • Whenever possible, instructional videos should be 10 minutes in length or shorter and should have an activity at the end that applies the video's content. Research has shown that students' attention in a passive learning situation, such as watching a video, tends to drop off significantly after that time. Also, novices need time to process new information before they can remember it. By making your videos short and requiring students to apply their understanding of the content afterwards, you are likely increasing the amount of your content that they remember over the long term. Additionally, if you make a mistake while recording a shorter video, you have less work to do to correct or replace it than if it were a longer video. So recording shorter videos saves you time and effort, too.
  • Accurate captions are essential for students with hearing disabilities, but they also help many other students, including students with learning disabilities like ADHD, working students, and any student who doesn't have a quiet study space in which to listen to instructional content. Unfortunately, while YuJa has a very good auto-captioning function, computer generated captions are still not accurate enough to meet California's standard for accessible captions. So if you plan to share a video with your students, take the time to review its captions afterwards to correct word choice and punctuation. This doesn't just help you comply with the law; it creates a better learning opportunity for many of your students.
  • Once or twice per year, take a few minutes to review your YuJa video collection to download copies of videos that you want to keep for long-term archival purposes and delete videos that you no longer need. Our YuJa storage capacity is large but not unlimited, so we both have automatic video archiving policies and storage quotas that we ask users to maintain. By curating your video collection regularly, you will reduce your risk of losing important videos and help other faculty by leaving more space available for them and their students

Resources

Get Support

If your question isn’t answered by the above resources, we encourage you to visit CTET either in person or via Zoom, submit a help request, or just email us. We are happy to do a 1-on-1 training or support session with you. You can find our current business hours and contact information, including our Zoom link, on our Contact Us page.

Outside of CTET's business hours, you can also contact YuJa directly for support. They staff their phone support line from 7AM to 9PM and answer their support email 24/7. To find their contact info, visit the YuJa Help Center and scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, past the documentation.

Student Support

CTET only supports faculty, not students. If your students report any issues to you, we would encourage you to look at the issue with them and, once you've documented it, report it to us. Then we can figure out the cause of the problem.

If your students need direct support, they can contact SSU's IT Help desk for technology support, Monday through Friday, 8AM to 5PM. Additionally, students can also contact YuJa directly for support. They staff their phone support line from 7AM to 9PM and answer their support email 24/7. To find their contact info, visit the YuJa Help Center and scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, past the documentation.