The paper reports on the progress made by second-year language degree university students as regards their use of online corpus construction, annotation, and search tools when exploring video genres (Baldry and Thibault 2010, 2020; Jablonkai and Csomay 2022). Through first-hand experiences undertaken with students using the OpenMWS platform (Taibi 2020; http://mws.pa.itd.cnr.it/), the paper describes the ways in which, through the creation of new interactive communities, participation in the Messina OVP (Online Video Project) has empowered these students with regard to their acquisition of textual competences and, above all, their preparation for more intensive AVT studies in their third and final year. As such, the paper is a first-step towards online audiovisual translation that lays the bases for subsequent translation work and which is thus concerned with the underlying cohesion and coherence of the overall text as well as the analysis of specific textual formations in these videos.