About the Curator

At the start of the pandemic of 2020, I (like many other professors) was forced to transition my classes from face-to-face to online. One of the important considerations when finding lecture and video materials for the course was finding video content that was accurately captioned. While many videos on YouTube are captioned with autogenerated captions, we all know how inaccurate the captions can be. We all have a story about a word or phrase that YouTube wildly, and inaccurately, captioned.

My college, like yours, has clear guidelines about only showing captioned videos (even when there are no students who have self-identified as dead or hard of hearing). Since the benefits of captioning can help ESL students and even native speakers (by visualizing words and adding comprehension by displaying audio and visual cues simultaneously), we should all strive to use accurately captioned videos.

Since I know firsthand the time needed to track down material that is relevant, appropriate, and captioned, I thought having a website like The Lectern would provide a place to share these resources. I have a YouTube channel where I offer a variety of resources, but I felt the need to create this space to organize the videos in a more logical, organized, and visual way.

I hope this page finds any audience needing it: full timers looking to expand their online resources, part-timers looking to quickly find content for new or existing preps, and graduate students just building their teaching resources.