First, contact Student Disability Services to ensure a live captioner is available. You will need to coordinate times that will work for you and the captioner. When creating a Blackboard Collaboration Ultra session, email the captioner the guest link. You will also need to discuss with the captioner the best way to deliver the captions in your sessions. The caption tool or the Everyone Chat Channel are both options with pros and cons.
Important: Always record Blackboard Collaborate Ultra sessions and allow learners to have access to the recordings. It may take up to a day for recordings to become available.
The captioning feature will allow learners to see real-time captions within the Blackboard Collaborate Ultra session. Learners will also be able to download the captions once the recording is made available. Learners will only see current captions, and there is not a feature to scroll through previous text. If there are multiple captioners, learners will have click to back and forth between different caption channels to see all of the captions provided.
The Everyone Chat Channel is beneficial if there are multiple captioners because they can caption in one area without any issue. Learners will not need to try to follow which captioner is creating captions. Learners will also be able to scroll through previous text – approximately up to 50 messages.
However, if the Everyone Chat Channel is for captions, learners will not be able to utilize this chat channel for discussion. Learners may not have microphones to engage in the session and need to use the chat feature. While learners can use the other chat channels to communicate, only the Everyone Chat Channel saves when a session is recorded, and all learners will not see chats outside of the Everyone channel.