Page 43 - Campus Technology, October/November 2018

2018
Jordan Cameron
their own captions if they wanted to,” Cameron said. “Also, we couldn’t afford to do every cap- tion for our faculty, so we needed a system that would give us flexibility and more self-service functionality.”
Because Kennesaw uses Kaltura Media Space for campus video storage, it chose to work with a company called Ceilo24, whose solution was compatible with Media Space. “We went with the company with the lowest price that was willing to build the features we wanted,” Cam- eron said, adding that Ceilo24’s solution required some changes before it would meet Kennesaw’s needs. “We were honest with them and said it was not going to work for us [as is]. There were several problems with it. It was difficult to use.” But she gives the company credit for being will- ing to make necessary changes. “I think they ap- preciated that it was making their product better.”
One of the benefits of the solution they co- developed is that faculty do not have to down- load and upload files. They can create, edit and share videos directly in the captioning environ- ment. They also can create and edit caption files as well.
Kennesaw also requested that Ceilo24 change its captioning to adhere to the DCMP (Described and Captioned Media Program) specification, a project of the U.S. Department
of Education and the National Association of the Deaf. “We gave them a copy of the guidelines and said we need what you are doing to conform to these standards,” Cameron recalled. “They edited their settings to align with that.”
The new solution went live in 2017, and now more than 30 campuses in the University Sys- tem of Georgia have the offering available to them. “When they saw how well it worked, the university system said we can give the rest of the universities in the system the opportunity to buy this as well,” Cameron said.
Cameron noted that faculty members have in- creased their requests for professional caption- ing as well as do-it-yourself captioning since the new system was deployed. “Our Kaltura usage has gone up so much that we are paying a lot more,” she said, “but it is worth it to know our videos are being captioned and more than that, the faculty is actively thinking about ways to meet the needs of diverse learners. That is the big- gest benefit from this — that they are engaged in these conversations and making sure their in- struction is encompassing all students. Those conversations were not happening on the same scale before this project.”
David Raths is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | October/November 2018