The 3Play Way: Simplifying Real-Time Captioning for Higher Ed [TRANSCRIPT]
DARIA FERDINE: Good morning, good afternoon, for all of those joining us here today. Thank you so much for joining our session, The 3Play Way– Simplifying Real-Time Captioning for Higher Ed.
My name is Daria Ferdine. I’m here on the marketing team at 3Play Media. I’ll be helping moderate today’s session. We have a really awesome panelist discussion for you around today’s topic.
Amazing. Just a quick overview of our agenda that we have put together today. We’re going to talk through and level set a little bit on language, terminology, and showcase a couple of findings from our friends at the National Deaf Center. We’re going to talk through our platform, our live professional captioning for EDU service here. We’re going to definitely pull back that curtain and talk a little bit around behind the scenes.
Jessie is going to walk us through the scheduling process and take it home for us with all the best tips and tricks for a seamless semester. We will have space, like I said, for Q&A at the end of today’s session. So please feel free to get those over to us, and we’ll make sure that we can answer as many in live real time today.
So awesome. I’m going to kick start over to our amazing panelists today. We’re going to let them introduce themselves. Really excited for today’s topic. Derek, do you want to kick us off?
DEREK THROLDAHL: I will. So hello. Thank you to everyone joining today and taking the time with us, as well as the people that join later and watch the recording. I am Derek Throldahl. I use he/him pronouns. And I’m the VP of Live Operations here at 3Play.
I’ve been involved in live captioning, and that’s been my focus for more than 20 years, and the last 10 years have been with 3Play. And I also have with me Jessie. I’ll let you introduce yourself as well.
JESSIE ZIONTS: Thanks, Derek. Hi, everyone. My name is Jessie Zionts. I am the Senior Customer Success Manager here in the education space at 3Play. And I go by she/her pronouns.
I’ve worked with over 100 different colleges and universities to help them find success with our services and just accessibility in general. And I work with many folks in similar positions, if not the same position to you all in today’s webinar, just to ensure their semester goes off without a hitch when it comes to live captioning.
I have countless hours of scheduling live captions under my belt. And I’m excited to share how this service works and my best practices with you all. And for the few customers that are joining today’s call that I work directly with, thank you for joining. But I’m going to pass it back to Derek to take over the next few slides.
DEREK THROLDAHL: Great. We’re really excited to talk about how live captioning can enable students to access learning in the classrooms and to support their success. But before we go any deeper, I want to start by level setting on what even is live professional captioning. This may be obvious to some, but I want to ensure that we’re on the same page.
So at 3Play, we use the term “live professional captioning.” You may also hear it referred to as real-time captioning or CART services. Traditionally captioning was associated with broadcast television and embedding the captions into the video stream. CART services was more aligned on event spaces or in the classroom, where a captioner would come into the space, they would plug in their equipment, and they would have a screen where people in the room could read along.
As technology has gotten more digital and people are doing more things remote, especially since COVID and the pandemic, and there’s more flexibility to different workflows, these terms get used very interchangeably. And you’ll even hear it here today. As we go through this webinar, myself and Jessie will maybe use the term CART or live captioning interchangeably.
The result is the same intention. We are simultaneously converting that spoken word into a text format so that it can be readable to the users. We also will use the phrase “live professional.” This refers to trained professional humans that are creating the captions. We do also offer live automated captioning. And I’ll spend a little bit of time talking later about those two distinctions.
Either way, the service is really broken down into three different unique steps. The first step is that the captioner has to listen to the content that is happening. So in this case, we have Adrienne as our captioner today. She is joining the session and she is able to hear everything that I am saying.
And then the next step is she creates those words. She’s actually writing as fast as I am talking. And I’m trying to talk slow to keep it reasonable for her.
And then we have to deliver that caption back to the viewer. In today’s example, we have the Zoom captions available in-platform. We also have a second screen URL. This is a link that you can open up into a browser. We’ve shared that into the chat. I encourage you to click on that, open it up.
There is an accessibility menu at the top where you can change the font size, the colors, have it be more accessible for the way you want to view the text on the screen. And so, again, that’s the core process of how we provide live captions.
So now that we’ve level set on what that service is, I want to talk about how that applies to the higher education institutions. So, Daria, if you want to go to the next slide here, we’ll talk about this report here from, as you mentioned, our friends at the National Deaf Center. They identified in this report, which was an excellent report that they put out, that more than 200,000 Deaf or hard of hearing students are enrolled in post-secondary institutions. And of that group, 90% of them are requesting CART services.
I don’t think these stats are surprising to anybody that works in the disability resource centers. But this last one really stood out to me, in that 1 in 5 of the respondents that they surveyed identified that their requests go unfilled some of the times, or some of the respondents even said often their requests go unfilled.
And I understand why this happens. Captioners may get ill. There may be limited captioner resources available. The vendor that the institution is working with may just have an unreliable reputation. But this is really disappointing to see, because reliability is one of our key focal points at 3Play, alongside quality and ease of use.
We have large– excuse me. We have a large resource of in-office employees, we have remote employees, and we have contractor employees to ensure that we have the scalability to cover all of the requests that we have. We pair that group of resources with captioning supervisors and a support staff, including Jessie herself and others that are proactive to make sure that we aren’t missing requests that come through, that we are reliable and dependable for those students who are asking for the service.
The other thing I really like about that report is that they summarized near the end the challenges that they were hearing from the respondents. And they identified filling last-minute requests, dealing with technical issues, and the overall cost of providing the services.
And these resonate with us because we hear the same thing with the different schools and institutions that we talk with. Students are adding and dropping classes even after the semester has begun. We live in a digital world with a lot of different technical setups and different ways to use the technology. And those different variations create their own challenges.
And human labor can be expensive, especially when compared against automated alternatives. And so we do our best to reduce the stress of those issues by really providing scalable resources. We have an attentive support team. And we offer flexible, remote solutions where you only pay for what you use.
And the other thing that wasn’t identified in the report, but we hear it as we talk with different prospective customers, is that there is so much happening in the disability resource centers, so many things that they have to do. And it all takes time and effort.
And one of the things we’re trying to resolve is making this service more convenient, making it easier to schedule and get captioners assigned and to pair them with the student needs. And so that’s one of the things that we certainly are taking effort into making easier, so that way those challenges are mitigated. And again, we’re doing everything we can to be a partner for the challenges that you face.
So let’s talk about where 3Play Media, in particular, fits into this space. Our roots are in education. So 3Play Media was founded in 2008 by four MIT graduate students researching affordable ways to make video accessible through innovative technology.
Two of those founders are still with the company as our CEOs. And as you can imagine, our first customers were educational institutions. And today, education still remains one of our core segments. We work with over 1,000 higher ed institutions.
The reason that they choose 3Play in part is because we have a full suite of accessibility services. So we have captioning for recorded video files. We have live captioning, audio description, we do translation. And one of the newer service offerings that we have is dubbing.
All of those are contained within a single platform. So users can log in and self-service their ordering. They have quick access to files. So for the recorded workflows, you can upload your video asset. And then you can download the different complementary assets as they’re available. But even for live captioning, you can log in, request the service, and then you’ll have immediate access to things like the second screen URL, for example, so you’ll know right away what you need and you’ll have those available to you.
The other thing that we hear as we talk with prospective customers is the frustration around visibility into the captioner assignments. So we hear they’ll email the vendor, and they’ll get the acknowledgment that the email was received. But they don’t know that a captioner wasn’t matched or there was a scheduling conflict until the event begins or the class starts. And suddenly, there’s no captioner attending to actually write what is necessary.
So one of the ways that we’ve addressed that is on our platform, we’re very transparent with what you’ve ordered, all the information associated with the order, as well as if a captioner has been matched or assigned to that program. So we’ll show you straight up if it is still being matched to a captioner.
And then immediately, when it is assigned, you will see that– we don’t see that lag time happening very long. By the time you refresh the page, it may already have a captioner assigned to it. But we do want to make sure that you’re aware, and you know and you have the confidence that when that event begins, we have a captioner there for you.
You can also log in, review your invoices, pay the invoices. And all of this can be done either by self-servicing and going to it directly. Or we also have public APIs, and we have different platform integrations. So depending on what the technology is that your school is using, we’ve got a lot of ways to work with the systems.
As for live captioning itself, we do 100,000 hours every year, everything from national television events to government assemblies, to stadium sporting events, and then of course college classrooms. We have an army of professional captioners that have seen it all and done it all. And I can assure you they take tremendous pride in their work, which is something I want to talk even further. I want to really go deeper into that point.
Accuracy is something that we really value. While 3Play– and here, Daria, if you want to go to the next slide. While 3Play offers both professional live captioning and automated captioning– often you’ll see that referred to as ASR– we strongly advise that there are distinct uses for each offering.
Every year, 3Play puts out an Annual State of the ASR report. And we assess the different speech engines in the market. And we do this on recorded content, which means that we are taking video files, uploading them, and having the ASR create the transcript of the whole file, which means it has context, more than what you would have for live.
And even in those recorded assets, we’re still seeing the best of the ASR engines are around 92.7% accurate, which may be good enough for some content. But good enough is not always good enough. When the service is provided as an accommodation to access, when a student’s college career and eventually their professional careers are dependent on their ability to learn in the classrooms, they need captions that they can trust.
I mean, I take personal interest in this topic, because I started my career as a live captioner myself. So I graduated from a court reporting school in Iowa, where I first built my skills on stenography. And then I later learned how to do it with voice writing. And I understand from first-hand experience the challenges of creating excellent captions in real time and how nearly impossible it can be to create perfect live captions.
But I also know what is possible. And I’ve set a high bar for our captioners to put the same care into their service that I would. In fact, I’ve got– there’s a captioner in our Minneapolis office who, he’s described to me his experience as a captioner like playing Guitar Hero for a grammar enthusiast. They visualize the words as they’re hearing them and then trying to hit every syllable, every word, and create that in their transcript.
There’s just this fulfillment of doing a good job yourself, creating a clean transcript at 200 words per minute, and knowing that you’re providing access in some way to a person who needs that service. So they put a lot of care into what they do for sure.
Just to talk a little bit about how they do that, they’re reviewing style guides. We always love when we get prep material from the instructors, word lists, slide decks, syllabus, anything that they can reference as a way to just get more familiar with that content. They will utilize all of that, because they want to do a good job. They want the students to be able to get the most out of this service.
The captioners are very intentional with the custom words that we create. So it’s not just about getting the word “Derek” to be written. But it’s making sure that it’s spelled D-E-R-E-K, because it’s not just about having the right word, it’s about having the spelling, the formatting, the punctuation correct.
We will manually add speaker identification. We will do it by name to really give clarity behind who is speaking in the classroom setting. We will identify the instructors. The captioners have manual control over things like punctuation. They’ll ensure that the sentence structure is maintained and the integrity is there on the sentences.
The other thing that I think is really cool about our system is that– I mentioned in an earlier slide some of the challenges and inconvenience of things like scheduling and trying to assign a captioner to a student. And with our tools, you’re able to create a recurring schedule or a bulk schedule, depending on what your needs are. So we often see this with courses as they build out a semester schedule.
And on the other side of that, our captioners are also able to then claim an entire semester. They’re able to get access to the entire set of what was ordered, which means you, as the institution, have the confidence that everything is going to get covered by a captioner. The captioner has confidence in their workload and their schedule coming up. They know what to expect for their commitment. And then everybody gets the consistency that comes with recurring schedules.
The captioner is going to get more familiar with the process. They’re going to get more familiar with the content. They’re more efficient with how they’re preparing their dictionaries, because they can reuse the stuff that they’ve prepared. And they also get more familiar with the instructor’s accent, and things that come with the nuance of a class, maybe the cadence of how they go through their lectures and when they do breakout sessions and things. And so it’s important to us that captioners are on that recurring schedules, leading to so many more results, better results for everybody involved.
The last thing I’ll touch on that I think is important to mention is, when we’re doing human captioning, the humans are present for the events, which seems obvious. But that’s important to call out, because they’re also then helping to monitor to ensure things are running smoothly. They’re in the class or in the event. They’re able to flag, even internally at 3Play, if audio is not working, if the instructor didn’t open up the Zoom meeting, if the captions aren’t being displayed. They can be aware of that. They can escalate that. They can help to resolve that.
They’re also able to do micro adjustments as the session is happening. And so you don’t have to wait until the next class or a future semester to resolve errors in the captioning data. It’s really hard to be perfect as a captioner. But one of the things that we constantly stress with our writers is that when you see a mistake, you should adjust, and you should correct it, or you should build your dictionaries to make sure that you’re not waiting until the next day or the next session to get that word correct. In the next five minutes, when it comes up again, you should have already adjusted for that and corrected it to improve that content as it’s happening.
So again, I think I just want to emphasize how much we do care about accuracy as part of this process. Myself personally and all the captioners feel the same way about making sure that we’re putting forth the best product that we can.
So with that, we do have another poll question. I’m going to turn it over to Jessie for this part of it. She’ll go through that poll, talk through some of the process of scheduling, as well as sharing insights of things that she’s learned from working with so many of our customers.
JESSIE ZIONTS: So for this next slide here we are going to go through how to schedule 3Play’s live captioning services. There are two ways to schedule live professional captions here at 3Play, one, through the 3Play Media platform and, two, through our wonderful integration with AIM. Both scheduling processes could not be easier. And both should not take more than five minutes per course to schedule out the entire semester.
To schedule on the 3Play platform, you would schedule through our streamless option, which is highlighted in the graphic on the screen. The reason it’s called streamless is because we don’t necessarily need a stream to provide you with captions. We just need a way to access the audio, so whether that’s through a Zoom link, a Teams link, a phone number, or really whatever works for your university.
Once you click into the Streamless option, you’ll be presented with a very straightforward order form, asking you to fill out general event information. And once you filled out the order form, your live captions will be scheduled, and you’ll be good to go.
So for AIM, whether you’re an AIM DSV4 or DSV5, you’ll have access to the 3Play Media integration for scheduling CART captions. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that you’ll need to enable the– or AIM will need to help you enable the Communications Access module. Once that’s turned on, you’ll be able to access 3Play services through their platform.
Scheduling within AIM is a win-win for both your staff and the students. Staff no longer have to manage the extremely manual process of being the intermediary between the student, AIM, and the captioning provider. You’ll simply be able to schedule live captions based on the accommodations requests coming through the AIM platform.
And not only that, the students will have a very straightforward view in AIM where they can easily access their course captioning links and transcripts from the entire semester in one place. So we love the AIM integration and the folks over at AIM, and we know you will too.
For these next few slides, we’re going to walk through how to minimize classroom headaches through the pre-scheduling process, during the event, and post-live captioning your event. I do just want to caveat, and I know Derek already mentioned this, that we’ve always had such a huge focus on the education space. And we really do everything we can to simplify your workflows and your lives when it comes to accessibility. I feel we’ve really kept each and every one of you in mind as we’ve created and enhanced our live captioning tool. And I think you’ll see this as we go through the next few slides.
So prior to your event taking place, we’ve put in a few pre-event processes to make sure your event goes exactly as you want it to. First and foremost, 3Play’s live captioning services are completely self-service. You can schedule whenever you want at whatever pace you want. You simply just log into your 3Play account and navigate to the Live Captioning tab to get started.
Within the scheduling process, you’re able to share word lists, event instructions, and speaker IDs. And while it’s not mandatory to share this information, my customers have shared that it definitely provides them with peace of mind knowing that captioners have the tools to be more accurate and efficient.
And a fun fact that I wanted to share is that our captioners are actually able to add keyboard shortcuts if they have speaker IDs or word lists ahead of time. That way, if the instructor decides to throw out the technical term cytokinesis, our captioners won’t be wasting time questioning where the I’s go and how many E’s there are.
Through our self-service portal, you’re able to, of course, easily schedule events yourself. But you’re also able to just as easily edit or cancel requests directly within the portal. We see all the time that the course duration changes, or that the Zoom link changes throughout the semester. And you’re able to easily adjust that within the scheduled event for either just that one class or that class and the reoccurring classes to follow.
One of my favorite and my customers’ favorite aspects of our live captioning service is the ability to create one static captioning link per student. What this means is that when scheduling live captions on the platform, you’ll be able to create a static link per student that they can use for the semester, the year, or the entirety of their lifetime at your university.
The way this works is that you will apply the static link you’ve created to each reoccurring course the student has via dropdown menu in the order form. Once you schedule the live captions for the student, you can go ahead and send them this link and not have to think about sending them another second screen captioning link again. Based on feedback from customers, this is both a win-win for them and, of course, the students.
So we’re back how to minimize classroom headaches during the event. Once you’ve scheduled your reoccurring classes, we hope that you can forget about 3Play and just feel confident that everything is running smoothly in the background. You can guarantee that our captioners will be punctual and that they’re showing up prepared and ready to go.
If you would like to check in on your 3Play event, you’re able to either, one, review the second screen captioning link or, two, log in to your 3Play account directly to review the status of the event, which is where the transcript will be populating in real time.
And for those of you who have worked with 3Play before, you know how awesome our support team is. We have a dedicated support team working 24/7 to help ensure your live events are running smoothly. You can reach out to our support team at any point for assistance. And we even offer a direct chat box once your event has started within your 3Play account system. We truly want your event to be just as successful as you do. So we will do whatever we can to help ensure that.
And now for students during the event, your students may have access to our live summarization tool, which you’ll see on the right-hand side of the screen. At the start of the spring 2025 semester, 3Play introduced a new live summarization feature within our live captioning tool.
We developed this in close collaboration with higher education institutions to meet real classroom needs. And this feature allows faculty to enable live summaries alongside the standard verbatim transcript available through the student’s second screen captioning link.
Students have shared overwhelmingly positive feedback, especially appreciating the flexibility to switch between the full transcript and a more concise meaning-for-meaning summary, similar to a note-taking service. And because the summaries are generated from the human-produced verbatim transcript, you can trust that the source remains fully compliant. And I also of course need to mention as a bonus that there is no additional cost to enable the service.
So finally we’re ready to discuss how 3Play helps minimize classroom headaches post-live captioning event. First, I wanted to mention our automated transcript delivery service. Through the AIM integration, students will automatically have visibility into their course transcripts throughout the semester.
However, if you’re scheduling through the 3Play platform, you can set up an automated transcript delivery to each of your students without needing to add them into the 3Play Media account. My customers have shared that this is just another way that we’ve helped reduce the feeling of being the middleman in these accommodation requests.
In some cases, you may want to upgrade your live professional captions to our fully human reviewed post-production captioning service, let’s say if you’re posting the recording on Canvas or your school website. And 3Play makes it easy to do that.
As mentioned earlier, you can edit your reoccurring events whenever you need to, which means you can cancel them too. Let’s say you’ve scheduled a semester worth of live captions for a class, and the student decides to drop the class after the first day. You can easily go in and cancel those remaining classes with the click of a button.
And lastly, feedback. We highly encourage our customers to share feedback with us throughout the semester. We definitely want to know what’s working for you and what’s not working for you. And like I’ve said before, we’ll do everything we can to accommodate your requests and provide the best service we can. So definitely don’t be shy with sharing feedback.
So next, I wanted to talk about 3Play’s best practices for feeling success within your semester. I put this list together after working with countless different schools and gathering feedback from my customers to help folks like yourself start off on the right foot when it comes to live captioning.
This one might sound obvious, but get a vendor in place before the student accommodation requests come in. Even if you didn’t have a single live captioning request last year, it’s possible you’ll have three new students coming in this year that will need live captioning accommodations. And having a vendor in place before the semester starts will reduce your stress and improve your efficiency.
Before the semester starts, think about how you want to communicate with your students before, during, and after the semester ends. Let the student know how important it is that you are notified as soon as possible when they add or drop a class, or if a class is canceled next week. That way, you can ensure their accommodations reflect their actual needs.
AIM users, I did mention this earlier, but in order to use the 3Play integration, you need to ensure the Communications Access Module is enabled, so you can work with the folks over at AIM to get this done. And in my experience, they’re very fast to respond and very efficient.
Understanding your school’s on-site microphone options. So good questions to consider are, are the classrooms mic’d up? Will you need to have lapel microphones ready to hand out to students? Would they prefer a microphone they can place in the middle of the classroom? These are good things to figure out now before the craziness of the semester begins.
We highly encourage our customers to add an on-site support contact to all classes they’re scheduling. Most commonly, this would be the student or professor that is managing the Zoom link. You will want to add whoever will actually be available in real time to help our support team resolve whatever the issue might be.
So most commonly, the issue is related to not receiving audio. When this happens, our support team will send out a message to the on-site support contact and ask them if they can share a new way for us to access the audio, or really just help troubleshoot any issues that may be going on.
And we have noticed that when students have access to our support team, so if they were originally listed as a support contact, they end up proactively reaching out to them to let them know when a class has been canceled or rescheduled. So this student communication to our team helps reduce the work on your end, too.
And last but not least, just double check your event details when you’re scheduling. Do at least one pass over to ensure you’ve inputted the correct date, start time, duration, and a big one is time zone.
So lastly for me, I wanted to review the key takeaways from today’s webinar. First and foremost, we want you to think of 3Play as your partner in supporting your students. We know a lot of you wear many different hats and have many different responsibilities. And we want to help this– we want to help make this as easy as possible for you. We will be there for you to ensure your students are receiving the best possible support.
Our goal is for you to feel like you can set it and forget it with us here at 3Play. So once you’ve scheduled your live captions for the semester and shared the second screen captioning link with your students, you shouldn’t need to go back into the 3Play platform unless you need to edit or cancel an event. And we hope this can be just a quick task that you can check off your checklist for the semester.
Last takeaway here, as Derek mentioned earlier, is that 3Play can be one platform that you can go to for all of your video accessibility needs. As a reminder, 3Play offers many different accessibility services, not just live captioning. We offer post-production captioning and transcription, audio description, translation, and other language transcription. And all of this is available within your one account system. And this, of course, helps with organization, centralization, and simplifies billing. So all video accessibility services are on one invoice at the end of the month.
We highly encourage you all to reach out to 3Play’s sales team and try the service yourself. We think you’ll be super impressed, and we’re excited to work with you. But that’s everything from me. I’m going to pass it off to Daria to go through our final slide.
DARIA FERDINE: Amazing. Thank you so much, Derek and Jessie. You guys are quite literally the best. For all of our audience participants here today, just know that when you do live captioning through 3Play Media, it quite literally is Derek, Jessie, myself, the army of captioners around us. But we felt it was really important to hear it from the experts themselves.
And so we have a flood of questions coming in. So just for time purposes, I’m going to try to encompass the key themes of some of these. And Derek, Jessie, whoever feels most confident to answer, please just take it away. But we have a lot of questions around specific word lists and technical terms, probably more in the sense of medical content, stuff like that. How do our captioners deal with the more STEM-heavy materials?
DEREK THROLDAHL: Yeah, certainly, I can take that. So a lot of our content, as I mentioned, is education focused, and we do a lot of classroom accommodations. So we have captioners that tend to focus their effort toward claiming and working on those kind of assignments, which means they get very familiar and they get repetitive with the dictionaries they’re building and how they write those terms.
We also really encourage the bulk scheduling and bulk assigning on the captioner side as well. So they do start to get into a routine with the classroom. They start to almost learn with the students and building out their vocabulary with the students, and certainly looking ahead in the course content, in the syllabus, and those things as well. But we have a lot of captioners that are very fluent in STEM and other curriculum courses that we do. So the pool regulates in that way.
DARIA FERDINE: Awesome. Thank you. Marie in the audience has a great question. How do you make sure that things being captioned, especially student info, stay safe and private? My university is big on that.
DEREK THROLDAHL: Yeah, that’s a great question. I can take this one again. There’s a few different ways we do this. So first of all, like the second screen URL that we provide, we don’t want to limit access to that. But we also want to make sure that that isn’t going to people that shouldn’t be getting access to it.
And so there is this balance there of making it accessible while still restrictive. And we do that through obscuring the URL. So there is no password protection on it. Intentionally, we want to have it as a URL that is not something you can just guess what the vanity name is. So that’s the first step that we do is making sure that that’s obscured.
The second thing is all of our captioners are signing NDAs. They’re vetted. We’ve got background checks, and we’re going through the process to make sure they’re qualified captioners, but also responsible and professional individuals.
And as far as the content itself, this becomes a little bit of a gray area. We will caption generally everything within reason. So we want to make sure we’re not missing dialogue that a hearing person would be able to listen in on. But it’s also important for us that if there is a private conversation, very intentionally private– so for example, we see maybe there’s a microphone at the presenter’s podium. And a student comes up before the class has begun or after the class has dismissed, and they’re talking to the instructor not realizing there’s still a hot microphone there that the captioner is listening into. The captioner is not going to write that private conversation.
Unless we’ve had instructions from the university that says, caption absolutely everything you hear, we will use judgment on those moments that are more personal and not really part of the class. But otherwise, we are writing everything that a typical student in the room would be hearing. So that way, somebody that’s using the services, maybe they are hard of hearing or Deaf, they’re not feeling left out from something that others are engaging in.
DARIA FERDINE: Awesome. We might have time for maybe one or two more here. This came up on our support poll area. Can students directly chat with support?
JESSIE ZIONTS: I can take this one. So students can absolutely directly contact support. They can either do that through the 3Play portal, or most commonly is through emailing. So our support’s email address is just [email protected]. And we are happy to help them with any of their requests. We have seen it’s beneficial if the student is going to reach out to support, perhaps cc’ing somebody on the DRC team just for further visibility from your team.
DARIA FERDINE: Thank you so much, Jessie. We have a question just around any capability for in-person services to be offered for captioning?
DEREK THROLDAHL: We hear this with the CART. People think about CART, they think about an on-site captioner. That’s not something, intentionally that’s not something that we support. It goes back to those challenges we hear from the universities around scalability, around cost, around reliability. There’s just too many restrictions when you start to do on-site staffing.
So we offer all of our services as remote CART services. We provide that URL. We get audio through a digital means, a dial-in phone number, a Zoom meeting like this. And so we don’t offer on-site CART. But we still offer CART in a remote sense.
DARIA FERDINE: Great. And this was asked a couple different ways. If we have a homegrown tool for scheduling, is there any sort of API available that could connect for scheduling and providing support materials to homegrown services?
JESSIE ZIONTS: Yeah. So I can jump in on this one too. I would say that’s definitely a great conversation, if you’re an existing customer, to reach out to your customer success manager or your account director. And we are happy to learn more about your homegrown platform and how we can work with you there.
DEREK THROLDAHL: And we do have public APIs. And so you can certainly write against those public APIs. But if there’s something more definitive that you want either clarity on, or if you want to custom build something, then we can certainly have a conversation around it. But I would start with the public APIs.
DARIA FERDINE: Awesome. Thank you both. And quite literally for our audience, this is our favorite topic. And we’re going into the summer. We know that you have a lot of questions clearly following today’s just high-level overview of the live captioning services.
This slide has both Derek and Jessie’s contact information on there, as well as a QR code that will bring you directly to a form fill that could create space for us to answer all of your personal one-to-one situation questions. I’m more than happy to do that. But for time purposes today, unfortunately, we do have to wrap up.
Thank you so much for everyone in our audience for joining, asking really awesome questions. We love our EDU friends. You guys always come with the best questions. And again, thank you, everyone. We really hope that you enjoyed today’s session. Thank you so much for hanging out with us, and have a safe and healthy rest of your week.
JESSIE ZIONTS: Thank you, everybody.
DEREK THROLDAHL: Thank you.