#COVID-19: How Instructors are Using the YuJa Enterprise Video Platform for Remote Learning

Fortunately, modern solutions such as the YuJa Enterprise Video Platform provide instructors the ability to simultaneously live stream and record class lectures, host office hours, and hold meetings at the touch of a button. Requiring only a webcam and microphone, recording video is easier than ever and instructors can ensure that class is still in session as we continue to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tackling Coronavirus: How Instructors are Using the YuJa Enterprise Video Platform for Remote Learning

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Top Eight Benefits of Captioning

The benefits of captioning are manifold, however, there are a few significant advantages that every organization should keep in mind as they choose their Video Content Management System (VCMS) and lecture capture platforms.

Here are the top eight benefits of captions:

Provide Insights for Those with Disabilities

Captions can significantly help those with hearing disabilities and impairments. Captions can make verbally expressed words simpler to hear for those with hearing loss. This is because the meaning of words is affected by the hearer’s assumptions. Captions also give data about audio effects or speaker identification that may be crucial to understanding the content of the video.

Help Those in Sound-Sensitive Environments

With the help of closed captions, audiences can watch videos in places where sound is inaccessible or frowned upon. This is most true in libraries, offices, and public establishments. What’s more, auto-play on mute is a widespread trend on social media platforms. Captions can considerably improve the experience of these videos and help audiences understand the content of the videos without sound.

Having adept captions within your videos can help position your content higher on web indexes and search engines.

Improve Language Skills

Captions can play a great role in learning and improving your language abilities. Though not necessarily a surefire strategy to comprehend a foreign language, learning a language in lifelike situations through video content can definitely assist you.

According to research by the National Institute of Health, captions can help ESL students incorporate learning cognizance, acknowledgment, and maintenance when it comes to learning another language. For example, from the well-known Korean group, BTS, the lead singer, RM, has attested to learning English through watching the television sitcom “Friends” and using captions.

Boost Search Engine Ranking

Having adept captions within your videos can help position your content higher on web indexes and search engines. Through massive search engines such as Google and YouTube, your videos can be made to be more searchable and discoverable by audiences. In essence, your videos can become simpler to discover because of the wealth of information and video data that captions can provide for the content of your media.

Improve Understanding of Technical Vocabulary

Adding captions can add lucidity to your content. This is especially important for specialized language, brand name, or industry vernacular. If audiences do not understand the language being used, captions can provide the necessary clarity for watchers to appreciate and realize the content they were watching.

Understand Foreign Accents and Background Noise

With a lot going on throughout a video, captions can help audiences understand what is going on despite any background noise or side effects that are occurring. This is also true for foreign and difficult to understand accents as audiences can read along with the speaker to fully grasp the content of the video.

Increase Literacy and Comprehension Rate

Students can benefit significantly from captions. They can have the added benefit of reading while listening and giving data textually and using video is much more engaging for students. In students’ early years, utilizing captions while watching any form of video can maximize the exposure of reading and improve literacy and comprehension.

Provide Accessibility for Everyone

Accessibility is the most notable advantage of captioning. No matter the form of video, captions can make video content more accessible for a wider audience. With captions, audiences can access videos from any location. This includes sound-sensitive environments for all audiences as well as literally any location for those with hearing impairments or disabilities.

Captions significantly enhance the experience of watching videos for many people. This is especially true for those with hearing impairments, however, even those without disabilities can benefit greatly from captions. Overall, captioning videos has many benefits that can assist audiences as well as organizations who elect to use them effectively.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest blog from one one of our technology integration partners, cielo24 Learn more about how to integrate human-based captioning services to the YuJa Enterprise Video Platform.

Six Ways to Support International Week of Deaf People

International Week of Deaf People (IWD) is a global event held the last full week of September to raise awareness of the rights, contributions, and culture of deaf individuals.

This year, IWD is set for Sept. 18- 25. The theme is “Building Inclusive Communities for All.” Each day has its own theme under the larger inclusivity theme, which are listed as follows: 

• Monday, Sept. 18: Declaration on the Rights of Deaf Children 
• Tuesday, Sept. 19: Building Capacity Across the Globe
• Wednesday, Sept. 20: Realizing “Nothing Without Us”
• Thursday, Sept. 21: Putting Deaf People on the Agenda
• Friday, Sept. 22: Achieving Sign Language Rights for All
• Saturday, Sept. 23: International Day of Sign Languages: A World Where Deaf People Can Sign Anywhere
• Sunday, Sept. 24: Building Inclusive Deaf Communities

”A world that is more conscious of deaf persons’ needs and rights is a world where deaf people are provided the access they need to contribute as equals.”

Learn more about each day on the World Federation of the Deaf website.

Coming together to show awareness for Deaf people within communities helps people better interact and communicate with deaf people. This week gives people an avenue to advocate for policy change and improvements in education, employment, and accessibility. 

“A world that is more conscious of deaf persons’ needs and rights is a world where deaf people are provided the access they need to contribute as equals,” the World Federation of the Deaf states.

Here are a few ways organizations and individuals can support IWD:

• Promote Awareness: Use your organization’s communication channels, such as social media, newsletters, and websites, to spread information about IWD. Raise awareness about the importance of deaf culture, sign language, the importance of assistive devices and technology, and the challenges faced by deaf individuals in various aspects of their lives.
• Create Accessible Content: Ensure your organization’s online content is accessible to deaf and hard of hearing individuals. Provide captions, subtitles, and transcripts to make your content inclusive.
• Collaborate with Deaf Organizations: Partner with local or national deaf organizations to co-host events and share resources. Collaborating with experts and advocates from the deaf community ensures that your activities are respectful, accurate, and relevant.
• Advocate for Policy Change: Use the IWD to advocate for policy changes that promote accessibility, equal rights, and inclusion for deaf individuals. Engage with policymakers and relevant stakeholders to raise awareness about important issues.
• Host an Event: Organize events, workshops, webinars, or seminars focused on deaf awareness, sign language education and accessibility. These events can help educate your employees, clients, and your community about the experiences of deaf people.
• Make a Long-Term Commitment: Supporting the IWD is not just about a week of activities. Consider making your support for the deaf community an ongoing commitment beyond the IWD. Implement sustainable practices, such as offering accommodations, fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace, and regularly engaging with deaf organizations, and make sure you’re giving deaf people a seat at the decision-making table.

Ensuring accessibility is essential for deaf people to have equal opportunities, rights, and engagement in every facet of life. Accessibility tools and technology, such as captioning, alternative formats facilitate interactions in educational settings, workplaces, healthcare environments, and daily interactions. 

 

YuJa to Present at Canadian Symposium on Academic Integrity

The in-person conference will be held at the University of Manitoba Fort Gerry campus in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada June 1-2, 2023.

CSAI  brings together the community of experts, leaders, and champions of academic integrity in higher education.

“YuJa is pleased to be a part of the symposium and to share our knowledge on academic integrity with other champions in higher education,” said Nathan Arora, Chief Business Officer at YuJa, Inc.

”YuJa is pleased to be a part of the symposium and to share our knowledge on academic integrity with other champions in higher education.”

CSAI Bi-Annual Conference is Canada’s leading conference dedicated to creating cultures of academic integrity, promoting the values of honesty, trust, responsibility, fairness, respect, and courage, and elevating the quality of teaching and learning across post-secondary education.

Yennhu Nguyen, Director of Client Success, will present “Using YuJa Verity to Ensure Academic Integrity.” YuJa Verity Test Proctoring Platform is one tool in YuJa’s suite of ed-tech products that enables automated and live online proctoring. YuJa Verity integrates directly with an institution’s Learning Management System and Single Sign-On tools to securely deliver and manage exams, including from third-party vendors.

YuJa is a Silver level sponsor of the conference.

More About the CSAI Conference

Founded in 2019, CSAI brings together the community of experts, leaders, and champions of academic integrity in higher education. This community consists of a diverse group of people including post-secondary educators, librarians, student advocates, students, as well as administrators, and sponsors.

CSAI 2023 will provide many opportunities to engage with academic integrity champions from across Canada and internationally and to gain new insights into other key issues that intersect with academic integrity.

Well-known keynote speakers will share their knowledge and wisdom during the conference program. Additional program highlights include dynamic discussions, interactive workshops, and scholarly presentations. This year’s symposium centres on the theme of Looking to the Future of Academic Integrity.

YuJa Contributes to Heartland Community College and Illinois Community Colleges Online’s Accessibility Efforts

Heartland Community College, a public community college with four campuses in Illinois, has made tremendous strides in accessibility and has helped lead Illinois Community College Online’s accessibility efforts. One of the primary drivers has been YuJa Panorama, one product in YuJa’s suite of high-impact media solutions that help institutions deliver accessible, engaging video and media content to users.

“…the shining star of this transition is (YuJa) Panorama.”

YuJa Panorama enhances accessibility with auto-generation of a number of Accessible Alternatives of course material in the background — from HTML, to electronic Braille, EPUB, audio (speech-to-text), high contrast, tagged PDF files and more and provides a Visual Gauge for a quick check of accessibility. Detailed reports at a course and institution level help measure and track accessibility.

Anna Catterson, Ph.D., Executive Director, Online Learning & Instructional Technologies at Heartland Community College and an Assistant Professor, Baker University School of Education and Jewel Crowley-Custis, Coordinator of Instructional Technologies at Heartland Community College recently published a white paper Breaking Down Barriers in the Heartland to highlight the institution’s journey to accessibility. 

“When Heartland Community College began this journey, the college was not aware of many accessibility laws and regulations, especially when it came to Section 508 Refresh,” the whitepaper states. “Our college was not alone, in fact, after a poll completed in 2019, over 85% of community colleges in Illinois reported that they had no accessibility plan or timeline (Illinois Community Colleges Online, 2019).”

“Panorama is integrated into every course and is viewable on both the faculty and student side. The faculty are provided an accessibility score for their entire course with suggestions on how to improve accessibility.”

The institution launched YuJa’s Enterprise Video Platform and YuJa Panorama for Digital Accessibility this past fall. “While YuJa has expanded options for video recording, including the automatic addition of captions to each video recorded or uploaded, a video editor and various options of recording features, and video quizzing, the shining star of this transition is Panorama,” the authors note. 

“Panorama is integrated into every course and is viewable on both the faculty and student side. The faculty are provided an accessibility score for their entire course with suggestions on how to improve accessibility, especially for their documents. Each document that is uploaded is also provided with a scale of how accessible it is. Students have the option to download every document, such as a syllabus into various formats, including braille, epub, text-to-speech, and more. To date, since the implementation of Panorama, Heartland Community College’s overall accessibility rate for Canvas courses is 64% with over 2000 uploaded files with no accessibility issues.”

Read the full whitepaper on LinkedIn.

Emerging AI in Healthcare and its Impacts on the Modern World

One specific example of AI in healthcare is the development of Google Health in recent years. While the initial version of Google Health was discontinued in 2012, a new branch was reorganized in 2021 with the goal of improving “access to high-quality, equitable healthcare across the globe” (Corrado) and the ability to offer “clinicians a longitudinal view of patient records and the ability to quickly search through those records using a single secure tool” (Landi). While Google Health has many benefits for physicians and their patients, there are also many concerns that come with introducing advanced technology into sensitive spaces.

Google Health is a great resource for health care providers to pull up medical documents, view test results, and send prescriptions to pharmacies quickly and efficiently. Furthermore, Google Health has programs such as ARDA, or Automated Retinal Disease Assessment, which uses AI to detect ophthalmological issues such as diabetic retinopathy. This complication of diabetes can cause blindness if left untreated, so rapid detection is essential. Google Health also has programs that can measure heart and respiratory rates with a smartphone camera, which is “now available on over 100 models of Android devices, as well as iOS devices.” (Corrado) Recently, Google Health developments have also introduced that smartphone microphones may be able to detect heart or respiratory issues such as heart murmurs or heart valve disorders in the near future. While doctors use stethoscopes as routine parts of every medical exam, the technology in smartphone microphones could pick up abnormalities in heart rates or breathing patterns without having to go to a doctor’s office.

However, while there are many benefits to utilizing AI in medicine, there are several drawbacks. For example, data leaks are a serious concern. If AI has access to millions of people’s sensitive medical histories worldwide it would be devastating if that data somehow got hacked into or leaked. Furthermore, AI can still be inaccurate when reporting information, so if people take the information AI gives them at face value, it could lead to many misdiagnoses or incorrect information being given to patients. Finally, AI will lead to a significant loss in jobs. As reported by the 2018 World Economic Forum, “ AI [will] create a net sum of 58 million jobs by 2022…[but] 75 million jobs will be displaced or destroyed by AI by the same year.” (“Pros & Cons of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine – College of Computing & Informatics”) This net loss of 17 million jobs is detrimental to people working these jobs and their families.

To conclude AI in healthcare settings is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it will be revolutionary in providing at-home healthcare solutions and disease detection, while at the same time bringing severe job loss and security threats. However, people today can look forward to a more modern approach to everyday healthcare practices and advancements in how we detect health problems.

Works Cited
Corrado, Greg. “The Check Up: our latest health AI developments.” The Keyword, 24 March 2022, https://www.blog.google/technology/health/check-up-ai-developments-2022/. Accessed 12 May 2022.

Landi, Heather. “ViVE 2022: Google Health expands AI capabilities of Care Studio to organize patient data.” Fierce Healthcare, 8 March 2022, https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/vive-2022-google-health-expands-ai-capabilities-care-studio-organize-patient-data. Accessed 12 May 2022.

“Pros & Cons of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine – College of Computing & Informatics.” Drexel University, 21 July 2021, https://drexel.edu/cci/stories/artificial-intelligence-in-medicine-pros-and-cons/. Accessed 12 May 2022.

YuJa Provides Open LMS Support

YuJa recently announced that it is an Open LMS Certified Provider. Open LMS is the commercial provider of the open source Moodle learning management system and maintains the Blackboard Collaborate plugin. Now, YuJa’s Video Platform seamlessly integrates with Open LMS, as well as other Moodle™-based LMS systems.

“The YuJa Enterprise Video Platform operates as both a standalone learning solution, as well as, an integrated solution within an existing LMS, like Open LMS, through LTI integration.”

This integration will make it easier for instructors to upload and manage videos directly in the Moodle/OpenLMS environment. The YuJa Enterprise Video Platform provides organizations with tools to store, organize, and access media content, and all media content that has been added to the Video Platform is made available directly through an institution’s LMS.

“YuJa has been included into our plugin matrix as an approved vendor plugin and is now a Standard Vendor,” the OpenLMS team shared. “This means that if a customer asks to integrate our LMS with (YuJa) they will be able to do it.”

Open LMS, which uses open-source software to deliver engaging learning experiences, leverages the YuJa Enterprise Video Platform to, among other things, auto-encode uploaded videos, deliver them over a global content delivery network, and provide captioning within the Open LMS platform. The YuJa Enterprise Video Platform operates as both a standalone learning solution, as well as, an integrated solution within an existing LMS, like Open LMS, through LTI integration.

University of Manitoba Hosts YuJa Video Contest

When YuJa was deployed at the University of Manitoba in September 2021, a contest was launched the same day. Instructors and staff who used the YuJa Enterprise Video Platform within the first month were entered into a contest to win a prize that includes a UM tote bag and products from YuJa, Dell and D2L.

Entrants poured in, and winners have been announced.

“Wow, I never win anything,” said Dr. Juliana M. Marson when she found out she was a YuJa Video contest winner. The assistant professor at the Centre for Earth Observation Science can no longer claim to never win because she picked up her UM tote filled with prizes at The Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning.

YuJa Video Platform prize winners came from faculties and units across UM including:

• Faculty of Science
• Asper School of Business
• Clayton H. Riddell Faculty of Environment, Earth, and Resources
• Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences
• Faculty of Arts
• Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management
• Faculty of Law
• Max Rady College of Medicine
• Rady Faculty of Health Sciences
• Robson Hall Law School
• Vice Provost Teaching and Learning
• Libraries
• Faculty of Graduate Studies
• Extended Education
• Faculty of Education

Congratulations to all the winners!

This blog was adapted from the university’s news release. Check out the release here.

YuJa to Highlight Innovative Ed-Tech Solutions at 2022 ATXpo Academic Technology Conference

YuJa is proud to be a Gold Sponsor for the Monday, Oct. 3, 2022 event. This year’s theme is “The Future of Academic Technology: Bridge the Gap Between Teaching, Learning, and Technology.” Members of the YuJa team will be sharing examples of innovative academic technology that makes it easy for institutions to consolidate disparate systems into a single, scalable platform that promotes in-classroom, blended, hybrid, online, and social learning.  

“Although ATXpo participants represent many different fields, departments, and pedagogical approaches, the common thread is a dedication to improving teaching with technology,” the ATXpo conference website states.

“Although ATXpo participants represent many different fields, departments, and pedagogical approaches, the common thread is a dedication to improving teaching with technology,” the ATXpo conference website states.

In addition to keynote speaker Dr. Jeanae Cohn, the event will feature IdeaLabs to showcase practices, projects and technologies that support excellent teaching and learning; student and faculty panel question and answer sessions, and more.

YuJa Announces 2022 Scholarship Winner

Students entered essays on a variety of topics, including artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, video conferencing, medical advancements, deep fakes, and more.

A panel of judges selected Alexis (Lexi) Curran as the winner. Lexi is a student at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, where she is majoring in hospitality management. Her essay was titled “Emerging AI in Healthcare and its Impacts on the Modern World.” In it, she highlights the development of technology such as Google Health, along with the advantages and disadvantages of such technology. 

Read more about Lexi below. 

Tell us about yourself.

“Because of my unique perspective, my goal for the future is to become a travel agent who specializes in helping disabled people travel the world. “

My name is Lexi, I’m 20 years old, and I’m a hospitality management major at Kennesaw State University. I love to travel and go on adventures with my service dog, Nova. 

Nova helps me navigate life living with epilepsy, and really opened my eyes to the world of the disabled community and how often we are discriminated against. Because of my unique perspective, my goal for the future is to become a travel agent who specializes in helping disabled people travel the world.  

What has been your best experience in school? 

As for grade school, my favorite experience by far was being a part of my high school marching band. We became two-time grand champions my freshman year and there’s nothing quite like that feeling you get seeing all your months of hard work pay off in the best way possible. As for college, I’ve only been here for two years, but so far, my favorite experience has been connecting with other service dog handlers around campus and learning from them.  

What influenced your choice of major? 

I really enjoy planning vacations for my family, and my mom suggested one day that I could make it into a career. So, I combined my love for traveling and my want to help people into the perfect career path for me. 

How do you envision yourself in five years? 

My main goal is that I hope I am happy. Ideally, I would be traveling the world with my service dog and helping others do the same, living somewhere I love and feel safe. 

What do you hope to learn from your college experience? 

I really hope to learn how to interact with people from all walks of life, and how to navigate important conversations with people who won’t agree with me. 

What extracurricular activities do you enjoy? 

I love board games, playing with my dogs, building Legos, painting, reading, and playing video games. I also love any adventuring I get the chance to do, such as traveling, snorkeling or ziplining.