Skip to main content

Accessible Distance Learning


IBM joins Hunter/DigitalChalk to provide captioned online courseware

The City University of New York's Hunter College, online course developer DigitalChalk and IBM have gotten together to make short work of accessible distance learning.

As part of a Hunter College project to provide a higher level of accessibility for Web-based continuing education courses offered in DigitalChalk, IBM Research collaborated with the school and the Asheville, N.C.-learning system provider to add speech-to-text captioning capability for deaf or hard-of-hearing students. The result is a multi-media online "classroom" with a transcript synchronized with over 90 percent accuracy to an associated training video.

While the technology may be complicated, the concept is simple. A Hunter College professor creates online course content, including video, uploading any standard-format video file to DigitalChalk, where it's automatically transcoded into Flash video. At the same time, the audio portion of the video is transmitted to IBM, where it's transcribed using advanced speech-to-text technology.

Synchronized closed captions

DigitalChalk includes the transcribed text as captions in a unified online display that includes the rendered Flash video and any PowerPoint slides the instructor chooses to include. The combined technologies provide what DigitalChalk calls the first-ever automated, closed-caption transcription service for video-based online learning.

It's accessible learning that's online, on demand... and apparently just in time. At least one study showed that the number of students with learning disabilities enrolling in higher-education courses skyrocketed toward the end of the century, increasing a whopping 173 percent.1

Russell Stinehour, CEO of Infinity Learning Solutions, the parent company of DigitalChalk, says the next goal is to make distance learning more accessible to the visually impaired. In a distribution to media outlets, Stinehour said the transcription service "has further implications in optimizing and tagging content within videos for ease of use by visually impaired students, as well."



Learn more