Come hear the story of how three people worked together in support of a student who identifies as deaf. We will cover the experiences, lessons learned, and technological solutions used to make student virtual presentations accessible to all learners. A team of a librarian, instructor, and instructional designer worked together to identify tools, create documentation, and train students to create virtual presentations for two assignments in a hybrid secondary inclusive science course. Instead of making just the presentations the student needed accessible (the minimum requirement), the professor decided to use this assignment as a teachable moment to require all his students to create accessible presentations.
This presentation will cover the experiences, lessons learned, and technological solutions used to make student virtual presentations accessible to a student who identifies as deaf. Of note to our presentation is that we used the required accommodations as a teachable moment to inspire students to consider captioning as a baseline to any video product they may need to create as future teachers. We believe this will result in teachers that take accessibility seriously and employ universal design for learning instead of adapting their instruction when a student needs an accommodation.
In the spring of 2018, students in a hybrid secondary inclusive science methods course were required to record final presentations and then view their classmates’ presentations and provide feedback at the end of the course. One student, who identifies as deaf, enrolled in the course with accommodations that included ASL interpreters. So, what had worked in the past (VoiceThread), was no longer an option. At the time of our experiment, VoiceThread did not allow automatic captioning either. This left us in with a problem to solve.
We reviewed our available campus solutions: VoiceThread and Kaltura MediaSpace. Neither system allowed for automatic captioning at the time, so we had to come up with a different solution that would work. After some troubleshooting, we decided to employ YouTube’s captioning. YouTube is ubiquitous and has a fairly good automatic captioning rate. Further, the editing interface for closed captions is user-friendly. While YouTube accepts many different file formats for upload, it does not allow for direct screen recording. For this, we used Kaltura CaptureSpace Desktop Recorder as a supported solution. We chose this program because it is embedded into Blackboard and works for both PCs and Macs.
With some help and in-depth documentation and an in-person instruction session, students were instructed to use the Kaltura CaptureSpace Desktop Recorder and export the .mp4 file created by the program. Once they had located the .mp4 file, it could then be uploaded to YouTube using the student’s personal Google account. Next, permissions on the video were set such as language and privacy – unlisted instead of private was essential to avoid having to invite the entire class to the video. Then, after a short while the initial captions were ready. Students then returned to edit the captions using YouTube’s editor. From there they could grab the share link on their video and paste it in a discussion board.
The outcome for this adventure was fully-captioned narrated presentations posted to a Blackboard discussion forum. Students used our documentation to complete the task. The instructor received feedback that several of the students used their videos during student teaching in later semesters. While we have new options available to us today, thanks to advances on the part of vendors, we could use the same process or one of our new solutions.