Closed captions proved to be a challenge in this online lecture for a Landscape Architecture.
In my capacity as lead designer for Texas A&M’s Core Curriculum Project, I oversaw the development of 12 SCORM modules for the Landscape Architecture program. My team designed the interface, developed the interactive elements, and added the closed captions. Our SMEs provided PowerPoint slides, quiz questions, and narration.
My favorite part of this project was sourcing Creative Commons imagery to replace the copyrighted sample images the professors scanned from textbooks. I spent several enjoyable days in Flickr looking at beautiful garden photos. It almost made me forget our offices were in a windowless basement. Our most interesting image-related obstacle was to find a photo from the garden that included a view of a tower in different garden several miles away.
Our biggest challenge proved to be closed captions. In 2013, most eLearning software didn’t have much in the way of closed caption capabilities. We were using Storyline, which did not support closed captions on slides. As a result, we had to manually create captions using triggers, which proved to be labor intensive. We also couldn’t afford to have a transcript made. Our best solution was to train one of our student assistants in Dragon NaturallySpeaking, then have the student listen to slowed-down recordings through headphones. He repeated the professor’s words into a microphone so Dragon could turn it into text. Each video has about 45 minutes of audio, so we had thousands of lines of text to manage. I developed a Byzantine two–part automated process that made the process mostly hands-off.