The project to caption and transcribe OpenChem, supported by the California State University and the California Community Colleges, is underway. To see an example of its benefits, check out this YouTube video of a class lecture in the Chem 131C playlist. Chem 131C, Thermodynamics and Chemical Dynamics, was taught last year by Professor Reginald Penner, current chair of the Chemistry Department.
Update! In addition to Chem 131C, Chem 51B and Chem 51C (organic chemistry) are fully transcripted in YouTube.
Why caption? These captioned videos permit individual topics, lectures or entire classes to be assigned at any public university as a required or supplemental part of a course. They support students with auditory disabilities as well as all students who want to search the transcript for a given topic. Combined with our ongoing effort to topically index OpenChem, we will ease the pain for those who want to quickly find what they are looking for. The captions are time-indexed and used in conjunction with YouTube’s transcript tab, the transcript scrolls down according to timecode to exactly match what the professor is saying. Of course, you can also turn on the closed captioning (CC) to get much larger text displayed in the same rectangle as the video.
Moving forward, the captioning will support our efforts to provide OpenChem in Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese and other languages. It is our hope that second-language learners of English will particularly benefits.