CU Boulder Supports Students and Faculty With Rev Captions

Supporting Students with Captions and Visibility

The Digital Accessibility Office at CU Boulder has always focused on supporting students. By providing course accommodations in the form of captioned lecture content, they broaden the availability of learning. But captioning all of that content was tricky, according to Laura Hamrick, CU Boulder’s Assistant Director of Digital Accessibility.

First, they needed more resources than were available in-house due to staffing restrictions and turnaround time needs. CU Boulder considered employing students to fulfill their captioning needs but lacked the capacity to do so. “For the past five years, and for the foreseeable future, we’ll be using an external vendor for our caption services,” Hamrick said.

Second, college students frequently deal with specialized terminology. If that terminology is inaccurate in captions, it can impede a student’s progress and potentially the success of their academic career. Professors are at the forefront of any student’s academic success. And the professors at CU Boulder have been diving headfirst into the digital age.

“Accuracy is so important to us with regard to captions that it’s our most important non-compromisable principle when considering vendors,” Hamrick said. “I would be surprised if that trend reversed itself at any point.”

Finally, while the Digital Accessibility Office primarily focuses on course accommodations, they are also pulled into other accessibility situations. When someone at the university in a media role needs captions for public-facing content, they turn to Hamrick’s team. In order to keep billing and caption schedules straight, Hamrick needed visibility into spending and turnaround times. “It’s really helpful to be able to share with folks on campus how long a video takes to be captioned, on average,” Hamrick said.

Better Quality, Lower Cost

University budgets are stretched thin–even more so in the recent academic climate. In order to support students with the quality they need and expect without busting their budget, Hamrick and her team turned to Rev. “I think the cost per minute with Rev could be half as much as we were spending elsewhere, and that’s significant,” Hamrick said. Even better, Rev was able to provide captions with no reduction in quality.

By working with Rev, the Digital Accessibility Office has been able to provide captions for a greater volume of shorter videos. When CU Boulder ran a comparison between vendors, Rev delivered content faster and at a lower cost for the same level of accuracy. The decision to bring a vendor onto campus is often a very involved process. Cost is one of the many factors at play.

Features to Grow On

When the Digital Accessibility Office upgraded to a Rev Pro contract, it opened up a wealth of new information and features. Using Dashboards, Rev users can accelerate their workflow with data-driven insights, centralize expense reporting, and share executive-level summaries of progress to keep the higher-ups keyed into progress.

“There were questions I hadn’t thought to ask that were reflected in the Dashboards,” Hamrick said.

Hamrick and her team typically start planning their course accommodation captioning workload at the start of the semester. By utilizing Rev’s integration with their LMS, Hamrick is able to save valuable time and just tag a video to be sent off for captioning. The Rev interface is also very easy to use and Hamrick is certain she could onboard new users with little training.

“I'm particularly excited about the dashboard and the data analytics side because we do extensive homegrown data analytics on our expenditures,” Hamrick said.  “It would be wonderful to be able to have some of that taken out of our hands.”

Some providers are good for a one-off, but the Digital Accessibility Office wanted to be able to scale up their offerings in the future. Overall, Hamrick appreciates how Rev has grown with her team’s needs. She recommends planning for organizational needs when any institution is considering a speech-to-text vendor.

“Scalability is something that has taken me a bit of time to wrap my head around,” Hamrick said. “But it is really, really critical with the volume of content and creators you have on a university campus.”