July 18, 2018 (3:20 PM - 4:00 PM)
### Media Accessibility and The Promise of the Cloud
**Presented by:** Dave Rathbun Instructional Technologist at University of Cincinnati
Higher Education is undergoing a dramatic transformation as students with disabilities, veterans, single parents and working adults enroll in ever-increasing numbers. This significant shift in student demographics, coupled with the exponential growth in the use of instructional videos in online courses and aggressive monitoring by advocacy groups and the Department of Education, urgently highlights the need to produce universally accessible course content. Despite industry innovations, such as automatic speech recognition and crowdsourcing, have dramatically lowered the cost of captioning, and transcription or translation of media, reductions in state and Federal education spending keep these services prohibitively expensive.
This presentation will examine how artificial intelligence projects like IBM Watson, Google DeepMind and Microsoft's Deep Learning Center are using the power of neural networks to transform how students interact with and consume media. This transformational technology has the promise to expand the reach, utility and affordability of accessible educational video.