10/6/2015
Transcription services are becoming increasingly important for bringing attention to educational webcasts, which have become valuable extensions of learning institutions. The rise of online colleges has been directly linked to the growing adoption of academic transcription. Through online audio and video technologies, students are now able to interact in a live classroom using their computers/laptops.
Some of the ways professional educators can utilize webcasts are by offering online lectures, quizzes, and interactive Q&A sessions. This modern approach to education has made learning more efficient, including speeding up learning curves. Students can now learn at their own pace from their own homes or wherever they feel comfortable. It also allows them the flexibility of planning classes around jobs instead of the other way around.
How Academic Transcription Help Educational Webcasts
The use of archived webcasts has become just as important as live webcasts. Such archives can be researched the same way a student uses a library, provided the information is documented in text form. Without text, information from audio or video cannot be indexed by a search engine. Speech recognition software can provide approximate transcriptions, but its limitations caused by noise and other factors make it an inferior solution when accuracy is important. Since this software is not always reliable, it's necessary to use experienced professionals for academic transcription.
One of the reasons a transcription service works better is that it usually consists of a team that includes transcriptionists, editors, and proofreaders, which assures quality control. This team can also provide a full range of services such as summarization, annotation, translation, and simplification. Furthermore, video captioning cannot be done by software alone, so it's best to work with humans who can double-check for accuracy, context, proper grammar, and spelling.
Conclusion
It's much easier for educators to outsource transcription to a specialized company than to try to do this cumbersome work on their own. By allowing an experienced team to do the sometimes mind-numbing work of academic transcription, lecturers can spend their time on what they do best, which is researching, organizing, preparing, and delivering classroom lectures.