Presentations PST411
How to Efficiently Improve Barrier Free Access on Recorded Lectures by Semi-Automatically Adding Closed Captions
Date Thursday, Dec 3 Time – Room
With the availability of affordable high-quality recording hardware and video management platforms lecture recording becomes a popular service for students at a steadily increasing number of universities. Since each university has its own infrastructure and general conditions, the introduction is still an individual pro-cess requiring a lot of technical know-how and a clear definition of the workflow process. At our university we currently have about 620 recorded lectures, provid-ing students access via our Learning Management System (LMS) Moodle and via an open source video portal. With a main focus on barrier-free access to learn-ing material in general and hearing-impaired students in specific, we wanted to provide subtitles for all recordings. In addition, subtitles are also very helpful for students who do not have German (our main university language) as their mother tongue. Subtitles should be at least in German, preferably also in other languages in order to support foreign students (such as Erasmus) at our university as well. In this paper we will share our experiences how to efficiently create subtitles in a semi-automatic way. Furthermore, we will share the lessons learned with the in-troduction of the Open Cast platform and which technical workflow we particu-larly defined. This workflow is optimized for a moderate growth of recorded lec-tures – hence feasible for small and medium sized universities – and ensures a maximum of quality. It can be easily adapted to other universities.
Herwig Rehatschek
deputy head executive department learning with media, Medical University of Graz, Austria
Dr. Herwig Rehatschek studied Computer Science and Electronics and received his M.Sc. and his Ph.D. from the University of Technology, Graz. From 1997 until 2008 he worked at the non-profit research company JOANNEUM RESEARCH. His main emphasis was on eLearning and digital media analysis. He participated in many international EC projects and also managed and co-ordinated some of them. In 1999 Dr. Rehatschek won the Austrian state price in the category learning, knowledge and culture. In 2008 he joined the Medical University of Graz with the main responsibility for the development of the eLearning platform of the university. Since then he was actively involved in the set-up and implementation of the LMS, the development of eLectures, the introduction of a new virtual microscope and the design of a teacher training course (eDidactics – http://www.edidactics.at). He won in 2012 the Dr. Michael Hasiba price for innovative teaching and in 2017 the Austrian state price „Ars Docendi“ for innovative teaching in the category “innovative teaching models having a huge number of students” by implementing a non-linear-story telling concept within first aid and emergency medicine. In 2017 he started a pilot trial with a new lecture recording system. Until begin of 2018 one hundred recordings were online and available to all students of the university. In 2019 a new software platform for the lecture recording system was introduced which also offered a video portal functionality. By mid of 2020 subtitles were added and more than 770 recordings were available.