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ESC Region 13

How ESC Region 13 Uses Video

ESC Region 13 is an educational service center dedicated to aiding teachers and administrators through information, training, and consultation. ESC Region 13 strives to support and collaborate with teachers through various products and services.

With video being a vital part of educational offerings, ESC Region 13 staffs three video producers to film classroom observations, expert interviews, direct teach, and special needs awareness videos. This instructional content is then delivered to 60 school districts and 8 institutes of higher education in the Austin area. ESC Region 13 also utilizes video for online professional development courses.

A laptop with the Videocloud account interface shown.

Why ESC Region 13 Captions Video

For ESC Region 13, understanding the current state of accessible online video in education came about through an important prompt by the Texas School for the Deaf. As Barry Link, Video Production Manager at ESC Region 13, puts it: “We thought we were doing some great work by bringing our video online. We’re transitioning our workshops to online modules and working really hard to make things available to people. And here, one of our biggest partners is like, What about us? Why can’t you caption this?”

ESC Region 13 believes in providing all the tools teachers need to learn and grow, so they didn’t want to hinder the educational experience of any learner. With a fresh set of eyes, ESC Region 13 set out to investigate video captioning solutions. “It’s important. And as educators, I really feel like it’s our responsibility to make our content available, accessible, and as easy as we can to consume. And that’s really been where we’re coming from as a video production facility in an educational environment.” All of ESC Region 13’s content is now captioned with provisions for accessibility added to the production process.

Quicker Captioning Workflow with 3Play Media and Brightcove

Once video production is complete; ESC Region 13 uploads video assets to the Brightcove video server. While Link did consider other online video platforms, Brightcove won out. “Brightcove is something I highly recommend. It’s got a tremendous ability to handle a lot of video. We’re uploading almost a terabyte of video a month. It’s able to recognize the player, so it’s changing its encoding and making the playback fairly seamless on mobile devices as well as on desktops. And it’s got multiple players, so you can affect the look of it.”

Check out the Brightcove + 3Play Media captioning integration

After a video is uploaded to Brightcove, Link simply tags it “3Play” to commence the captioning process, which he describes as “magic.”

After linking Brightcove and 3Play Media accounts, captions can be requested for your video assets without ever leaving Brightcove. 3Play Media then automatically posts back captions to the Brightcove video, wherever it is published.

Link typically selects standard turnaround (4 days) for ESC Region 13 video but often receives captions back in two days. Because of the massive amounts of video ESC Region 13 produces, Link sees a tremendous value in the price, turnaround and capacity of the 3Play Media captioning service.

Making Translation & Subtitles Part of the Video Production Workflow

ESC Region 13 is now turning its attention to Texas’ Spanish speaking population. Spanish subtitles allow students, teachers and parents to access to ESC Region 13’s educational video content. ESC Region 13 requests subtitles using 3Play Media’s video translation service.

Advantages of Brightcove Video with Captions and Interactive Transcripts

1. Accessibility: Since accessible digital information is the core of their mission, ESC Region 13 decided to caption and transcribe all of their video content.

2. Searchability: Even though ESC Region 13 started captioning content for accessibility, what has Link most excited is the interactive tools: “The beauty of it is the interactive transcript… that really takes accessibility to a deeper place….You’re able to search a transcript, and get through that content more quickly and to what’s important.” (edited for clarity)

3. Engagement & Comprehension: Reading information while hearing it spoken allows for better concentration as well as recall. Auditory and visual teaching in tandem is important because often relying on one method can induce “burn out.” ESC Region 13 recognizes that captioned video helps to combat this learning fatigue.

I love the service! The ease and quick turnaround have been great and your software and system are awesome to work with! Also, the new Brightcove integration features are AWESOME! Everyone here at ESC XIII using the service thinks it’s amazing and it’s been a huge help to us providing greater accessibility to our clients. It has gone over so well that several different departments are now using the service. Again, I can’t stress enough how your service has allowed us to make positive changes in such a quick and professional manner.

Jim Gonzales
ESC Region XIII
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