I hope you are all staying home, staying safe and staying healthy. Your Board of Directors and all Global Alliance committees have been hard at work these last few weeks. Read on to discover what we’ve been up to. Thank you!
 
Assessment and Certification Committee Update
The last few months have been especially busy for the Global Alliance Certification and Assessment Committee members. Developing and refining a certification and assessment model is time-consuming and sometimes arduous, but we continue to work to develop what we know will be the best certification and assessment for realtime captioning, one that others will be compared to and one that will set us apart as an association.
Members of the Assessment and Certification Committee are Pablo Romero-Fresco (Chair), Chris Ales, Deanna Baker and Steve Clark. We are using the NER model to develop our assessment. Because we recognize the importance of having among our members certified NER evaluators, we are all working diligently to complete our training toward certification. You’ll find an update below.
More members of this committee are needed. Please email us at info@speechtotextcaptioning.org if you’re interested in volunteering.
Here is an update from our committee:

• The certification process for an evaluator is as follows: The evaluator must complete seven NER evaluations. Deanna is on her second evaluation, and Steve is on his seventh. Chris has completed her evaluations and is being mentored by Pablo to critique Steve's evaluations. Once Steve and Deanna are certified evaluators, they will be mentored by Pablo and/or Chris to critique other evaluators.
• Josh Foley, Global Alliance member, is joining the committee. We will then have four evaluators ready to certify others.
• Additional trainers and evaluators are needed.

Next steps as a committee are as follows:

• Define the certification and training process of Committee Members and others.  
• Discuss cost of certification for Committee members. 
• Outline the assessment and certification process to be used and standardized. 
• Complete additional assessments toward certification. 
• Choose assessment materials to be used by the Global Alliance. 
• Determine individual cost of assessment and/or certification for members. 
• Determine if an outside organization should approve the assessment. 
• Present final recommendation for Board approval.

We anticipate our certification and assessment will be completed in early 2021. Watch for more updates in coming newsletters.