Georgia Tech
How does Georgia Tech use online video?
Each academic year, Georgia Tech’s Department of Distance Learning records and processes 20,000 hours of lectures on campus and at remote campuses around the world.
Recorded lectures are made available to college students on campus and to high school students in the state.
Faculty are also starting to embrace the flipped classroom methodology, where a professor assigns a video lecture for homework and uses classroom time for discussion and exercises.
What’s the motivation for video transcription and captioning?
Georgia Tech stepped up their captioning initiative in response to an accommodation request from a hard-of-hearing student. But they quickly discovered that video transcripts and closed captions were valuable to many students — not just students with disabilities.
Georgia Tech hosts many international professors whose first language is not English, and the captioning makes it easier to understand their lectures.
Georgia Tech’s many foreign students who know English as a second language benefit, too. Even though ESL students can speak and understand English, being able to see the words on the screen makes a huge difference in clearing up misunderstandings, reinforcing correct spelling, and learning new vocabulary.
Another benefit: professors can use their own lecture transcripts to create and publish academic articles.
What Georgia Tech’s captioning process?
Georgia Tech uses Tegrity and Accordent to capture lectures. There is a full-time staff of 20 people responsible for recording lectures on campus.
3Play Media’s integration with Tegrity makes captioning extremely easy. After the files are recorded, the professor just needs to click a button to request captions. Everything else happens automatically and the captions appear on the video after they are processed.
Georgia Tech stores a local backup of transcripts and various captions formats that are downloaded from the 3Play Media account. The alternate captions formats are used to publish video on other platforms, including QuickTime and Windows Media.
Why did Georgia Tech select 3Play Media?
The automated captioning provided by the Tegrity – 3Play Media integration simplified Georgia Tech’s workflow and made it easy to train other staff members.
First, Georgia Tech tried using speech recognition for their captioning, but the captions they produced were too inaccurate. The they considered using students to do the captioning, but they found that the accuracy was unacceptable and the turnaround was unreliable, especially around midterms and finals.
Georgia Tech examined the closed captions produced by 3Play Media and determined that the quality and accuracy were very high. With 3Play Media, they receive two-day turnaround without fail.
It was important for Georgia Tech to be able to access transcripts and captions in a wide variety of formats and to monitor the status of files. 3Play Media’s intuitive account system makes it easy to manage Georgia Tech’s sizeable library of caption files, and they enjoy unlimited, free downloads of the files in whatever format they need.
In the end, no other vendor compared in price, quality, or customer service.
Results
Now Georgia Tech has a streamlined solution for adding captions to recorded video lectures to comply with accessibility requirements. The simplicity of the workflow and user-friendly interface makes it easy to train other staff members.
There have been zero complaints from students, only praise. In particular, people have been impressed by the captioning accuracy for professors who mumble, speak quickly, or have thick accents.
3Play Media’s captioning workflow makes it easy to teach others. We’re impressed by the accuracy even for professors who mumble, speak quickly, or have thick accents. There’s really no other vendor that compares in price, quality, or customer service.
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