Contents
Sandra Partington, Sandra Guzman Rodriguez and Maria Kaffa
[Paper]
The abrupt move to online delivery necessitated a creative ( fast!) and alternative approach to the delivery of lectures. Academic staff were advised by LEaD to take note of the practices online learning design and deliver lectures asynchronously in smaller sections (City, University of London, 2021).
Staff took up this challenge and segmented their lectures into a shorter form using video to create screencast lectures of 15 to 30 minutes, to be watched independently but embedded in the Moodle Module.
The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) site advises adding captions and transcripts to audio and video media is required for people with a disability and can benefit all users in variety of situations, e.g. where audio cannot be played or heard. A national study in the US reported that students without a disability used captions and transcripts for study, (Linder, 2016). Making media as accessible as possible then was essential for our rapid move to online delivery.
City switched on machine-based captions for our video platform, this feature was seen as a bonus as the captions are advertised as being 80% – 90% accurate and therefore would require little correction.
As a safeguard, a team of City students was engaged by LEaD to offer a caption correction service. Edinburgh University’s Subtitling Media Project gave us a precedent to use a student team (Edinburgh University, 2021) and we used their model to set up, run and evaluate the pilot.
This proved a rich learning opportunity for LEaD as we could collect useful data on e.g., the reasons for correction, subject area demand, causes of inaccuracies, difficulties in making corrections and time taken to correct. Staff completed a feedback survey.
The review of the pilot confirmed the value of correcting captions and identified ways we can develop good practice in the creation of screencasts lectures.
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References
City, University of London. 2021. Present. [Blog] Teaching Online Toolkit, Available at: https://blogs.city.ac.uk/teachingonline/start-here/present/ [Accessed 16 March 2021].
Linder, K., 2016. Student uses and perceptions of closed captions and transcripts: Results from a national study. Oregon: Oregon State University Ecampus Research Unit., pp.6-7.
The University of Edinburgh. 2021. Subtitling Media Pilot Project. [online] Available at: https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/subtitling-media-pilot [Accessed 16 March 2021].
