[Athen] RE: Captioning

[Wink Harner]

Dear ATHENites

 

I received an enthusiastic testimonial by e-mail this morning from one of
my favorite faculty members here at the college. It took me a long time to
convince him/win him over in making his courses accessible. Once I did
make headway, it was as if the floodgates released! Now he is one of the
biggest enthusiastic promoters of making his online courses accessible.
While we all know that there is no "perfect" solution for providing
captioning for the videos they show in class, having a faculty member so
enthusiastically share their revelation about how easy it is to do some of
the things that may courses accessible is refreshing. I am extremely
grateful for having won over someone who can also influence so many others
by his being willing to share his newfound knowledge and techniques with
other faculty! Following are some excerpts of the e-mail I received from
him today. Those of you who are curious feel free to contact me off-line
and I'll send you the link of to his experiment on YouTube. It may be an
interesting look at what possibilities there are for demonstrating to
others a simple technique that faculty can do on their own to make courses
more accessible.

"Wink:

 

I have been working to freshen up my web pages for my two online classes,
and I have been struggling with the issue of making sure that I have
transcripts for all video clips that don't come with closed captions. Last
night, I had a major revelation. Forgive me if you know all this already,
but I was wondering if you had looked at the way YouTube allows people to
add closed captions to their own videos.

 

What I didn't know is that all you need is a transcript file. YouTube
takes care of the timings!

 

It's a little video I have prepared for my course, and I had a transcript
all prepared. The rest was, as they say, cake.

 

Again: If I am telling you what you already know, forgive me, but I had
absolutely no idea it was going to be this easy. Did everybody in the
world know this and I just didn't get the message? Strikes me that we
should be promoting this tool since we've started using YouTube for
streaming our own videos.

 

Anyway, just wondered if you knew."

 

I have already thanked him for his enthusiasm and for sharing this. I hope
his enthusiasm is contagious!

 

Blessings all

 

Wink

 

Ms. Wink Harner

Project Support

OHS - NU6 119

Mesa Community College

1833 W. Southern Avenue

Mesa AZ 85202

winkharner at mesacc.edu

 

480-461-7448

 

 

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