As a course convener, you play an important role in ensuring all students are given equal opportunities to engage and succeed in their education journey. One easy step you can take that will have an immediate positive impact on student experience is by enabling EchoVideo Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for all your courses, ensuring that students have access to transcripts and captions.
Transcripts and captions address a range of access requirements that students engaging in digital content have, such as students with hearing assistance requirements (captions), students with sight impairments or blindness (transcripts), neurodiverse students (both), students with learning difficulties and cognitive loading challenges (both) and students with English as a second language (both).
Whether you are new to teaching, or have been around for some time, we believe everyone can benefit from reading more about the value of having ASR for EchoVideo enabled. Below are some examples.
Enhancing accessibility and inclusion
As a course convener, one of your primary goals is to create an inclusive learning environment that caters to the diverse needs of your students and EchoVideo ASR can be a great ally. By providing real-time transcriptions and captions, ASR ensures that students with access requirements, language barriers, or different learning styles can fully engage with your course content. Embracing ASR technology demonstrates your commitment to accessibility and inclusion, enabling every student to participate and succeed academically.
Compliance
In Australian higher education, ANU staff are expected to comply with the accessibility standards that underpin disability discrimination legislation. EchoVideo ASR helps you to comply with these requirements: by generating accurate transcriptions and captions, ASR aligns with accessibility standards such as the Disability Discrimination Act and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). By integrating ASR into your courses, you not only ensure accessibility but also demonstrate your commitment to upholding compliance standards responsibilities.
Facilitating effective learning outcomes
ASR technology has a positive impact on the learning outcomes of your students. By providing real-time transcriptions and captions, ASR enables students to review and reinforce their understanding of course materials and even search for specific content in your lecture transcripts. This comprehensive review process leads to improved comprehension, retention and, ultimately, better performance. ASR empowers you as a course convener to support student success by providing them with the tools they need to excel academically.
Engaging students in online learning
With the increasing prevalence of online learning, engaging students in this digital landscape is crucial. EchoVideo ASR enhances the online learning experience by providing written content alongside audio and video materials. This feature allows students to engage with your course content at their own pace, to review lectures, and to reinforce their understanding of the content. By leveraging ASR technology, you create an engaging and interactive online learning environment that caters to the needs of your students.
These are just a few of the benefits you can already bring to your course just by leaving ASR on by default.
We understand that some conveners may be concerned about the accuracy of these transcripts but let us reassure you. EchoVideo ASR is powered by the same engine as Amazon’s Alexa, meaning that not only is it powered by some of the most powerful AIs, but it also gets regular updates, ensuring that new vocabulary and information are added, making transcripts more and more accurate over time.
Most of us have already used transcriptions and captions generated by AI, for instance, while attending conferences and talks, participating in online meetings, and watching movies and videos on YouTube. We know that, despite accuracy being lower than 100%, overall, the resulting texts are impressive. Besides, research has shown that students would prefer to have transcripts that are slightly inaccurate rather than not having a transcript at all. If lack of accuracy still concerns you, know that you can edit your transcripts in simple and easy steps, making sure they are as accurate as you’d like them to be.
Considering the need to edit transcripts from time to time, we put together a Staff guide on how to edit ASR transcripts (opens ANU website) and we hope you find it helpful.
By incorporating ASR into your courses, you demonstrate your commitment to providing an exceptional learning experience that empowers all students to thrive. Embrace the power of EchoVideo ASR and embark on a journey toward inclusive excellence in education.
References
- What Is Automatic Speech Recognition? (opens an external website)
- 3 Ways that Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Will Improve Your EchoVideo Experience (opens an external website)
- ADCET Webinar: Accessibility and Automatic Speech Recognition with EchoVideo (opens ADCET website)
Digital Accessibility, Learning and Teaching, Information Technology Services.
If you’d like to stay in touch with the latest information on digital accessibility best practices, please join our Digital Accessibility Practices space (opens Teams). You can also reach out to us through this space for questions and assistance.
