Why Academic Transcription is a Great Idea

“There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do once you find them.”

Wise words from Jim Croce, and ones that definitely apply to the college experience. Time flies for students and educators alike, particularly during the exhausting process of preparing dissertations or lecture material. But you don’t need to save time in a bottle when you can just as easily save it by using academic transcription services.

Why Use Academic Transcription?

Whatever your role in the education system, academic transcription can be a great way to clear your to-do list and keep a record of your work. Here’s what else you accomplish with it:

Save time

It takes 6-8 minutes for a non-transcriptionist to type one minute of audio. Therefore, it would take you 6-8 hours to transcribe one hour. An experienced transcriptionist can transcribe that same hour in half the time. If you choose to use automated transcription, you may need to review it to be sure the machine caught every word, but even with that step, you can have a transcript in as little as an hour.

The transcript itself saves time as well – if you need to recall something, you could constantly fast forward and rewind your audio to find the clip, or you could do a quick search of the transcript in Word.

Share Knowledge

A transcript of a lecture or other event is an effective way to share the information with those who might not have caught it the first time. Perhaps a student missed class that day. Maybe he or she is hard of hearing, or perhaps the student is a native speaker of another language and needs more time to review and absorb the material than a real-time class affords. A transcript ensures these students have access to the information.

Increase Engagement

There are always interesting events happening on campus – commencement speeches, guest lectures and presentations, to name a few. Transcripts of these events can help attract the attention and interest of prospective students, alumni, community members or even people from other schools.

Preserve Content

If information needs to be retained, a transcript is an easy way to do it. Transcripts become archives that preserve the past, instruct the present and guide the future. Think about some of our longest-standing schools like Harvard or Yale. If they had been able to transcribe lectures and presentations from 250 years ago, imagine the fascinating things we’d be reading today!

How Can You Benefit from Academic Transcription?

Transcription is a useful service for pretty much anyone in the academic world, whether you’re taking classes or teaching them. Keep reading to see how different members can use it in different situations.

Students

Research for major papers often involves conducting interviews. While the hour or so spent with the interview subject can be enjoyable, the prospect of typing up that interview is far less appealing. If you were planning to transcribe all those recordings, you might as well cancel your evening plans now.

Hiring an experienced transcriptionist, on the other hand, allows you to focus on the other elements of your project. As an added benefit, transcriptionists proof their work before submitting it, so the final product will already be properly formatted with correct spelling and grammar. If you’re really strapped for time and cash, and you have a good-quality audio file, you can always use an ASR tool and do the proofing yourself.

One other benefit to using a transcript: reviewing a written transcript may trigger a thought that makes your project stand out.

Faculty

The instructor-student dynamic is most effective when students are fully engaged in the class. With heads bent over desks and hands frantically scrawling notes or fingers frenetically typing away, there’s little time for back-and-forth discussions. Moreover, crucial words of wisdom are bound to get missed.

An electronic copy of the day’s lecture posted online is an effective way to make sure students can review the material without missing out on the in-class experience. Hiring someone else to create the transcript frees you up to spend that out-of-class time engaged in your own research or extend your office hours to have more personal interactions with your students.

Schools

These days, many universities offer online courses and programs to supplement their existing on-campus degree programs. This lets them grow their student bodies while minimizing cost of additional classrooms and facilities. Today, more than 31 percent of college students are enrolled in at least one online course.

With fast turnaround times on transcription services, your online students can keep up with your on-campus students. At the end of the semester, you’ll have an entire course’s worth of lectures on file that can become the backbone of a stand-alone, at-your-own-pace online course.

Transcription also allows your school to memorialize and share other landmark events like guest lectures and commencement speeches, as well as any other events that keep prospective students, alumni and donors engaged with your school.

The growth of multimedia and online learning in education hasn’t reduced the need for academic transcription. On the contrary, it’s made it more important then ever. Instead of typing those notes on your own, save time and energy by hiring a transcription service to do it.

If you need reliable transcription, get in touch, or click here to quickly upload your audio files.