Case Study
Chatham University
Chatham University teamed up with Verbit for scalable campus-wide captioning, online course accreditation, faculty research transcription and to tackle uncaptioned library archives.
In a Nutshell
Chatham University’s team found not just a captioning and accessibility partner in Verbit, but access to a product team that would actively involve them in testing and roll out new features to serve their specific needs. Chatham has now scaled its captioning efforts across campus, achieved accreditation for its online courses, provided transcription support for faculty research efforts and tackled backlogs of uncaptioned library archives.
The Challenge
Chatham University needed a user-friendly and cost-efficient accessibility solution to help its students with disabilities and promote inclusion on campus and in online environments. Their team didn’t want to settle for one that didn’t check their boxes of accuracy, scale, regulatory compliance and dedicated customer service.
“Auto captions, machine captions, YouTube captions- none of that is compliant. It's really, really important for institutions to keep that in mind. That's one of the incredible values of Verbit.”
The Solution
Verbit’s flexibility and around-the-clock support made for a perfect fit for Chatham’s smaller staff with limited resources. With Verbit’s versatility, Chatham was able to improve its virtual courses and on–campus experiences and go beyond what it originally intended by captioning library archives and research as well. They also found that Verbit was open and willing to innovate with them and for them to release additional features. For example, when asked to make the sign-in process easier, Verbit’s product team eagerly opened its doors and co-created a seamless single sign-on (SSO) option.
The Results
- The ability to quickly and accurately caption at scale
“We had a deluge of non-captioned resources that were going to be part of a fully online program. For accreditation purposes, they needed captions with 99% accuracy. I looked into different captioning services, and Verbit ticked all the boxes.” - A more accessible campus
“Faculty members came to us for transcription options for their research. Different faculty members used Verbit to caption their interviews. We were then using live captions or captioning for events that were happening on campus, but my favorite thing is we have an archivist in our library, and she used Verbit to caption all our video archives. That was a big deal.” - A seamless captioning process when using Panopto
“The integration with Verbit and Panopto is seamless. It functions so well and has made using it so easy because that was our video storage platform. It was one click, and they were done. It was sent off to Verbit and then came back, and nobody had to touch anything or worry.” - An opportunity to suggest & test new features
“One of the things that I had been begging for since day one was SSO for single sign-on because it’s a lot of work to go in and like create accounts and have people log in and manage passwords. Verbit connected me with the product team. We did lots of back-and-forth testing. It was really beneficial, and it was fun to see it grow and work.”
“Using Verbit has been incredibly easy. They answer emails at all hours. They’re super responsive and just absolutely wonderful to work with.”
About Chatham University
Chatham University is located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It consistently ranks as one of the nation’s best schools for social mobility and holds the title of one of the “greenest” universities in the US. The university is home to more than 2,200 undergraduate and graduate students.