I wanted to share something that was recently added to my online classes. For those who don’t know, I’m currently enrolled in distance learning through online classes with the International Academy of Design and Technology based in Tampa, Florida (I’m in Marysville, California). Up to the third quarter, professors were giving powerpoint presentations and typing in Live Chats with students.

When the classes started moving into the design and coding aspect, and that’s when it got tricky for the professors to type while they were demonstrating techniques. So the Student Services and I had some discussions about that and came up with Real-Time captioning and had it added to the classes. Now the professor can continue lecturing while doing demonstrations on their computers. Here’s an example of what one lecture online looks like.

The area marked in red outline, is the Caption Pod and functions as a .swf file that is fed into the lecture simultaneously. The main area at top, is the lecturing/demo area where the professor has a powerpoint presentation. The smaller pods are student roster, the text chatting area, and the professor’s microphone status. There is almost no time lapse in the captioning. My classmates are often intrigued by the captioning although they don’t know there is a deaf person in the class. It has also provided an unexpected bonus: students reviewing the Live Chats later, can open and read the captioning by clicking on the CC symbol if they can’t hear the audio because sometimes the audio cuts out. I think it’s pretty neat. The captioning service is provided by one of IADT’s sister colleges in Colorado, and has a separate window for the client (me) who can customize the text in something like a black background and white text, any font or size. Additionally, it provides a transcript in plain text or HTML at completion.

Although not perfect when it comes to simliar sounding words, it has functioned well and I’m happy about being able to participate in the online lectures. This is something for others to consider when taking online classes and don’t know what to expect.