Transcription services are a boon for the education industry. Educators, students and administration staff are all able to make use of transcription to make their lives easier. From transcribing staff meetings, lectures or even classroom work, transcription services make it easier to record details for posterity.
There are many industries that have felt the benefits of embracing professional transcription services and education can be counted among them. Admin staff of all levels can more easily record and disburse the minutes of important meetings, university-level educators can record and convert important lectures to text and students of all levels can easily make classroom notes for future reference. The various different utilisations of transcription services in the education sector can increase accessibility, enhance efficiency and generally make life easy for many of the roles associated with education. This article will explore the ways that the three main roles of education, admins, teachers and students, can be well served by making use of transcription services.
Applications for administrators
Recording meeting minutes
Like many industries, behind the scenes of any educational facility is a constant myriad of various meetings. While the minutiae of those meetings might not always be critical, when important information is discussed it can become necessary to transcribe meeting minutes for dissemination amongst the faculty. Rather than doing this from memory or from shorthand notes, it is much easier to use transcription services. Professional transcription services will ensure clarity and reliability in the transcript they provide, much more so than if written from shorthand notes or memory.
Organize staff development materials
One thing anyone who works in education will tell you is that they spent a good amount of time participating in staff development days. Transcription services can help here by creating written records of the day or presentations given so that team members who aren’t able to attend can go over it in their own time.
Streamlining general admin duties
As well as more education-focused situations, transcription services can also help admin staff with more generic administrative duties. If students or potential future staff need to be interviewed, those interviews can be easily converted to text for later perusal. As well as being perfect for record-keeping, being able to perfectly record all the information of interviewed people makes the process of selection fair.
Applications for educators
Recording and disseminating lectures
For higher educators like university professors, they might have to give multiple lectures a week, and then repeat those lectures from semester to semester. Being able to use transcription services to record and perfectly transcribe those lectures will not only provide their students with a handy reference for study, but it will enable the professors to review their lectures themselves and make changes over time.
As a research tool
Many professors are engaged frequently or constantly in their own research. Transcription services can be used to help in this regard by transcribing private interviews with experts, the discussions and results of focus groups and other verbal-based research activities. This type of transcription could conceivably save a professor many hours. Once these materials are confined to text, they are much more malleable and easy to analyze, leading to quicker research results.
Applications for students
Faster, better and easier notes.
It shouldn’t always fall on the professors and education institutions to provide students with detailed notes of lectures and classes. For students that are serious about taking notes and want more time to review verbal educational materials in detail, transcription services can be a lifesaver. Instead of trying to furiously copy out everything that is said by the teacher or professor, students who are recording a lecture or class to be transcribed later can instead remain focused and present at the time. This is likely to lead to increased comprehension, both at the time and later when the transcribed material is reviewed.
Exam preparation
With accurate transcriptions, reviewing lectures and classes for exams becomes much easier. Transcribed works allow for students to make notes, highlight and even use search functions to help them review key terms and important lessons. This can be especially helpful for students taking classes in a non-native language.
Transcription as a tool for inclusivity
Greater accessibility for disabled students
Services that provide an accurate and speedy transcription of spoken lectures can be invaluable for students with some disabilities. If students who suffer from hearing disabilities can gain access to transcribed versions of spoken lectures, it allows them access to education that they otherwise might miss. By being able to do so automatically and without singling these students out, transcription services also allow them to engage with course materials in a natural way.
Narrowing the language divide
For students who are engaging with course content that is not in their first language, having access to transcribed copies of the verbal content can be a game changer. Transcribed copies of lecture materials are more easily translated into their primary language, or it could be that their language comprehension is fine when they are able to take their time and slowly absorb the materials. Either way, transcription services allow these students the same opportunities as native speakers.
How is AI used by transcription services?
Enhanced accuracy and speed
AI is currently able to accurately process hours of simple audio in a relatively short amount of time. This means that for situations where the audio is clean and a single speaker is audible, like a lecture, AI can be very helpful. For more advanced situations it is typical to defer to human specialists with experience and training beyond what an AI is capable of, but for simpler tasks, AI is very helpful.
Link with existing platforms
Many AI transcription services are designed with the ability to be seamlessly integrated into other platforms in mind. This means that recordings and transcriptions of things like lectures can be expected to automatically upload and update, meaning less work for administrators and educators.
Transcription in real-time
The best trick that AI can do, is to transcribe language in real-time. This type of transcription is more prone to errors and can often falter and miss words, but for those who need accessibility help, such tools are still very welcome. This type of AI tool is more likely to be found in online education environments.
Conclusion
From the above, we can see that transcription services are able to improve operational efficiency, simplify and enhance learning, and foster accessibility and inclusivity in educational institutions. Reputable transcription services enable all roles within education, from admin to students to educators, to overcome challenges with ease. It seems likely that these technological solutions to educational issues will only improve with time, leading to more efficient and inclusive educational institutions.
