California Community Colleges

The DECT Grant and CollegeBuys Program

AST has worked closely with the California Community College (CCC) system for several years as part of their commitment to serving students with disabilities. The world’s largest college system supports over 50,000 students with disabilities; captioning and transcribing media provides them with access to critical learning materials. AST provides captions and transcripts for educational and informational podcasts, various forms of video for distance learning, supplemental class materials, recorded events and faculty training.

Captioning widens the audience for these materials and aligns to accessibility regulations. Adding captions also allows content to be word-searchable and more easily indexed and cataloged.

AST was selected as one of the approved vendors for post-production transcription and captioning services by the Foundation for California Community Colleges CollegeBuys program (www.foundationccc.org).  When you purchase transcription and/or captioning services from AST under the CollegeBuys program, you receive the pricing negotiated by the Foundation. CCC users can use the CollegeBuys contract pricing for any captioning and transcription needs.

AST is also an approved vendor for the Distance Education Captioning and Transcription grant program (DECT). Under this grant program, member colleges can use AST’s captioning and transcription services for eligible distance learning materials and have the services paid for directly out of the grant funding. Information on the program can be found at: http://www.canyons.edu/captioning.

To Get Started

Depending on whether you are participating in the DECT grant program, or if you wish to take advantage of our bulk purchase program, there are a number of possible paths to follow. Choose from the following options to get started on setting up your CaptionSync account:

• I want to create an account under the CollegeBuys program for eligible DECT work.
• I want to create an account using the CollegeBuys contract for non-DECT services.
• I want to make a bulk purchase; create an account not affiliated with the CollegeBuys program.
• I already have an account with AST.

Our Services

CaptionSync is an automated service that enables you to submit your media through a web-based interface and receive caption files very quickly — within minutes if you are able to provide a transcript file, or within three business days if you need us to generate the transcript. We offer 50+ output formats that support most broadcast and web media formats, including popular types like Flash, YouTube, iTunes, and others.

CaptionSync can be used to generate a transcript of your media, or it can generate fully synchronized caption files for you. In addition, AST offers a number of captioning-related supplementary services:

• Result Review: when you need human review of the final output because you are unsure of the formatting of your transcript or because your audio is particularly noisy and does not work well with our automation.
• Digital NLE Captions: when you are using an NLE system to write your content onto tape media.
• DVD Transfer: when you have VHS or DVD media and you would like us to convert, caption, and author it for you.

If you are generating content with a lecture capture system from Echo360, Mediasite or Panopto, you can take advantage of the the CaptionSync integration that these systems offer to fully automate the captioning workflow.

Cost Effective

Our automated captioning service is very cost effective, and our educational pricing even more so.  CCC users can buy at the CollegeBuys contracted price. For eligible distance education material, CCC users can apply to the DECT grant program and have your project invoiced directly to the grant. Or you can purchase through our volume purchase program outside of the CollegeBuys program. AST offers bulk purchasing discounts for purchases in excess of 20 hours.

If you have questions about CollegeBuys or the DECT grant, please contact our experts directly at 877-AST-SYNC ext. 777 or email dect@automaticsync.com.