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grams, including one with the Schools of Social Work and Medicine that will look at Social Deter- minants of Health to help teach both social work- ers and medical students empathy when dealing with patients. We are seeing the rise of mixed and virtual reality from folks in the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development looking at products like Mursion to help teach fu- ture educators how to handle everyday scenarios that may occur in the classroom.
As I have written in an XR blog post, what we need are industry partners to help democratize the creation of content. We need to have tools to create content in a much easier way. Unless we make the creation of content easy and affordable, these technologies will never have a place outside of niche areas where big dollars can be spent.
4) VIDEO AND ACCESSIBILITY
Frazee: As the use of instructional video grows, so does the challenge to make instructional vid- eo accessible. Course capture systems, in-video quizzing, interactive video transcripts, and plat- forms that promote social learning via video post sharing are examples of this growth.
With that in mind, I recommend the following areas to watch in 2020:
• Audio descriptions are becoming more preva-
lent, with an increase of video players that al- low for custom user preferences such as the
ability to control the volume of video content
or the audio descriptions independently.
• Interactive video transcripts are becoming more widely used by faculty, staff and students for a wider range of purposes. Examples of this are Zoom transcriptions, which could be used
to document a virtual student group meeting. • Vendor integrations for captioning have be- come more frequent and more streamlined. For instance, Mediasite’s integration with Automat- ic Sync Technologies captioning services allows for more automated workflows and faster de-
livery of captioned video.
• There has been an increase in “in situ” DIY
methods for faculty and students to caption their own videos, especially when videos are shorter. An example is captioning video in Can- vas via Amara.
• There’s an increasing recognition that acces- sible videos are not only for the disabled and contain elements of Universal Design for Learn- ing that help all students learn.
Perez: Accessibility and video needs are not go- ing away. The sooner institutions have policies, procedures, and budgets associated with these needs, the better. More and more universities are under the microscope to ensure that all content is accessible to all segments of the population. This is not only because it’s the law, but it should
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