Providing live transcripts of lessons and instant feedback to teachers

The project team has developed a solution that, on the one hand, offers the possibility of providing real-time transcriptions and captioning to facilitate the professional development of students with disabilities. On the other hand the data can be used to provide feedback for teachers to improve their classroom techniques.

Problems Targeted

There is a need to enhance the quality of teaching and to improve the learning processes of students from lower resourced and disadvantaged backgrounds as well as those who face barriers due to linguistic or cultural competencies, such people who suffer from impaired hearing or are affected by Autism Spectrum Disorder. These students often find it hard to get access to conventional educational settings.

Solution, Innovation and Impact

The project team has developed a solution that, on the one hand, offers the possibility of providing real- time transcriptions and captioning to facilitate the professional development of students with disabilities; and on the other hand, to provide feedback for teachers to improve their classroom techniques. Staff of Access Innovation Media transcribe and add timecodes to each word through the usage of web-enabled devices and a telephone line, thus providing the contents of a lesson to users within about five seconds. After the lessons have been transcribed, the staff members have a lot of data by which to understand important metrics of the teaching process, such as how many words a teacher said and over how long a period. This data can then be used to address two common mistakes in teaching: excessive lecturing and overly fast delivery. Further, teachers can submit an audio file to Access Innovation Media and receive a transcript (available in PDF or .doc/x) and an analysis without the need of a live connection. After the team has received five hours or more from one classroom, they pass it to experts from the University of Melbourne, who also analyses it and provide a personalized report containing a summary of their observations and recommended teaching strategies.

Funding, Outlook and Transferability

The team is currently working on an offline option, to be available at the beginning of 2016, that offers the possibility to record lessons and upload them for transcription and timecoding. Also, a Visible Classroom application will be soon be released that allows teachers to record their lessons, upload the content, and receive a transcript, analytics, and feedback – all from one app. The goal is to implement The Visible Classroom on a global scale through awareness-rising of the product, with the support of global research projects at the University of Melbourne.

Pictures

Access Innovation Media provides feedback for teachers, like numbers of words said, and help them addressing their classroom techniques.