North Carolina State University:
Distance Education and Learning Technology Applications

 

The Business Problem

North Carolina State University is a research-extensive, land-grant institution that was founded in 1887. The university is the largest of the sixteen system schools, and the flagship campus for science and technology. NC State has approximately 7,000 faculty and staff who serve 30,000 residential students and 4,000 distance education students. NC State is a nationally recognized leader in science and technology with historic strengths in agriculture and engineering.

As a land-grant university, NC State is committed to serve all students and the people of North Carolina, regardless of disability. However, one of the perpetual obstacles to Section 508 compliance is accessible and usable media. The purpose of the investment in a system-wide site license that provides access to AccVerify, AccRepair, and Hi-Caption was to support faculty, staff, and students with the tools to make their Web content accessible and usable.

The need nationally and in North Carolina is significant. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 19.6 percent of the U.S. population has some form of disability. This group includes the hearing impaired, visually impaired, and those with cognitive and motor impairments. However, while almost 20 percent of the U.S. population has some functional disability, the proportion of persons with disabilities increases with age. An example of this is that nearly half of the population over 65 years of age has some form of disability. The number is even more dramatic over age 80. Approximately 80% of this population group has some form of disability. In North Carolina, the problem is even more significant. 21.1 percent of the population has an identified disability as compared with 19.6 percent nationally (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 Census of Population and Housing, Summary Social, Economic, and Housing Characteristics; North Carolina, 2000. see also: http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2000/phc-2-35.pdf )
 

Prevalence of Disability By Age (2000)
	Total	Number w/Disability	Percent w/Disability
All Ages	257,167,527	49,746,248	19.6%
5 – 15 years	45,133,667	2,614,919	7.2%
16 – 64 years	178,687,234	33,153,211	18.6%
65 years – over	33,346,626	13,978,118	41.9%

U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 Census of Population and Housing, Characteristics of Population  by Age, Disability Status, and Type of Disability, 2000.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/disability/disabstat2k/table1.html 

A challenge of providing accessible and usable Web content at NC State has been the lack of ubiquitous availability of accessible technologies that facilitate Web production.

Solution

Training. In order to provide instructional solutions for this growing population of students identified by the NCSU Disability Services for Students and the ever-expanding population of distance education students, the Distance Education Learning Technology Application (DELTA) unit and the Learning Technology Service (LTS) created a suite of accessibility and usability workshops, which includes Hi-Caption. In these workshops LTS trained 4,244 members of the university: 1,538 faculty and students, 556 customized instructional housecalls, and 2,150 consultations (LTS Annual Report, 2004). In addition, each of the Information Technologies Teaching Centers (ITTC labs) has Hi-Caption installed for student and faculty training and support for Web content production.

Software Support. Hi-Caption, AccVerify, and AccRepair have been used in DELTA LTS since 2003. The software supports faculty grant programs, instructional technology workshops, and institutional Web content development.

The need to prepare students to function and excel in a digital world combined with the need to meet national and state accessibility requirements requires a fundamental change in both the culture and the way courses are taught. Effective training solutions merged with accessible technologies and software are enabling. However, the interface for Hi-Caption is intuitive and does not require a lot of training. We found it is just as easy to train with Hi-Caption as it is with many of the other products we support.

Faculty require no previous knowledge of SAMI, SMIL, RealText, or Qtext. Hi-Caption effortlessly generates the code necessary to display closed captions with the click of a button.

Accessibility Project

DELTA LTS purchased copies of Hi-Caption to train faculty and students how to caption media files. HiSoftware provided expert, custom training in the software that became the basis for the faculty workshop. You may view a copy of the training materials produced for faculty development workshops at the Hi-Caption workshop site.

Typically, the workshop serves the Instructional Technology Assistant Program. However, the training materials are also used in custom instructional housecalls in which trainers go to faculty offices and assist in the installation and training of the software.

Benefits

• ADA Compliance. HiSoftware products partner with NC State to ensure compliance with Section 508.
• Universal Design. Captioning makes instruction as accessible and usable to as large an audience as possible. Text equivalents are a key element of Universal Design standards for educational media.
• Improved Comprehension. Synchronizing the text display of audio files, improves the reading comprehension of emerging readers and aids in fluency for adult learners. (see MacArthur, C.A. (1998). “Word processing with speech synthesis and word prediction: effects on the dialogue journal writing of students with learning disabilities,” Learning Disability Quarterly, 21(2): 151-166.)
• Learning Styles. Captioning involves the synchronization of text content with audio files. This permits students to efficiently conduct text searches by key words. The text transcript also enables students to print video text content they may later use to highlight or make margin notes about the lecture.
• Distance Education. NC State is committed to an exponential growth of the DE population at the university. Captioning improves the quality and comprehension of instructional materials for distance education students.
   

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