According to the California Community Colleges, distance education – the education of students who may not always be physically present at a school – comprises the college system’s fastest growing segment of enrollment.
These types of courses include online classes, hybrid classes (where some instructional hours are offered remotely), telecourses, and live classes that use web conferencing, podcasting, or content posted within a learning management system.
However, in order to provide access to all students and to comply with federal and state law, many aspects of distance education classes need to provide captioning or transcriptions.
VITAC is proud to be a pre-approved vendor for the California Community Colleges’ Distance Education Captioning and Transcription (DECT) grant. The grant enables California Community Colleges (CCC) to expand their video accessibility efforts by providing funding for live and pre-recorded captioning and transcription as a means of enhancing access for all students in distance education courses.
VITAC is recognized as an approved vendor for live, realtime captioning, which includes realtime captioning of classes, lectures, and podcasts that are delivered live via webcast, broadcast, Internet TV, and other means. A leader in the captioning market for more than three decades, VITAC’s live captioning solutions include the most highly trained, qualified, and experienced professional captioners in the business, supported by a team of highly skilled engineers, schedulers, and production coordinators.
Our educational captioning services include Internet Caption Streaming, where a captioner listens to a class, lecture, or meeting and sends captions directly to a web page accessed by students or projected onscreen; broad caption integration capabilities with web conferencing platforms, including Zoom, WebEx, and Adobe Connect; and traditional television and web captioning options for events streamed via YouTube, Facebook Live, and other platforms.
Funding for the DECT grant has been authorized by the California Community Colleges chancellor’s office, and is designed to ensure student access and CCC compliance with federal and state legal requirements as well as support faculty innovation and technological advancement.
Accessibility services are provided to colleges through a process whereby the grant recipient fills out a DECT application, contracts with an outside captioning vendor, like VITAC, and provides the vendor quote in its completed form.
Click here for more information or details on how to apply for a Distance Education Captioning and Transcription grant.
California Community Colleges is the largest system of higher education in the nation, with 2.1 million students attending 114 colleges, and provides workforce training, certificate and degree programs, and preparation for transfer to four-year institutions as well as more than 10,000 online courses.