Schools
UC Berkeley Lectures Removed From YouTube Because Of 2 Complaints
The videos were not close captioned for the hearing-impaired. The expense for the 20,000 lectures: $1 million plus labor costs.
BERKELEY, CA — About 20,000 University of California at Berkeley lectures will be made easily accessible to the public next month following the university's decision to limit access to them to mainly students and professors.
The university's Course Capture videos and podcasts were removed from iTunesU and YouTube on March 15.
The public will be able to access them easily when the digital platform for exchanging content LBRY goes live in April.
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"We saw some content disappearing that we thought shouldn't disappear," LBRY CEO Jeremy Kauffman said.
University vice chancellor for undergraduate education Cathy Koshland said that the university restricted the podcasts and videos partly because the U.S. Department of Justice found that the content had to meet
higher accessibility standards if it remained public.
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That meant that the content needed to at least be closed captioned.
That finding occurred following a complaint by two members of the National Association of the Deaf.
DOJ officials concluded in their investigation that the university was in violation of title II of the American with Disabilities Act because the content was not accessible when necessary to people with vision, hearing
or manual disabilities.
University officials also decided to limit access because the university is better off focusing on newer content rather than the Course Capture content, which is three to 10 years old.
She also said that limiting the material to only students, professors and others in the campus community will protect it from people who use it for making money without the consent of professors who created it.
Kauffman said, "I think the university's decision was understandable."
But Kauffman asked whether it is better that it not be available just because it doesn't have subtitles.
Closed captioning would cost $1.90 a minute or more than $1 million for the 20,000 titles, university spokesman Roqua Montez said.
That does not include the cost of paying people to do the work, Montez said.
— Bay City News; Image By brainchildvn, CC 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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