Podcast and Screencast Transcripts

This term I have a student who has a hearing disability in my class. This is my first experience with this type of situation. So far I have been really impressed with the transcribers that Drexel has provided. They have done a great job enabling me to communicate with the student in real time in face-to-face situations, despite the technical terms that must be used in teaching chemistry.

The transcribers are now in the process of transcribing my archived lectures . As they produce the text, it is being posted in a blog. The text is so voluminous that I have created a separate blog to avoid confusion when looking for the screencast lecture archives. We are working to see if we can further improve the process with closed captioning of the screencasts.

This experience is a clear demonstration of the leveraging power of new technologies in education. The transcripts are now available not only to this student but to any other student who can make use of them either because of a hearing disability or simply because it is convenient to do a keyword search to locate class content. Also, because the content is on a blog, it means that my lectures will be easier to find on search engines.

There are others who see the value of such an approach. For example, the video archives of the MIT OpenCourseWare project are being transcribed by OOPS. As I keep repeating in my talks, the power of this new educational framework is the low threshold multiplication of channels to distribute knowledge.