How to Get Your Professors to do the Homework on Transcribing Lectures
Heading back to school this fall has students facing a variety of changes, but not all of them need to be bad. If you’re a student entering a brand new era of remote learning, this may be the right time to throw in a few more new practices of your own volition. Sounding like more than you signed up for when you were just hoping for your course schedule? Well, what if you didn’t need to do anything, and could instead pass the homework off to your professor for once?
This week, we’ve compiled a list of A+ reasons why professors should transcribe their zoom lectures, and included how students can convince them to do so. This small change to remote teaching is a life-saver for teachers and learners alike, and professors can implement it without having to lift a finger!
It may sound too good to be true, but it’s not, and here are the top 3 reasons why professors should start transcribing their Zoom lectures (if they haven’t already) this fall.
Increase Accessibility
Accessibility has become a rising focus around schools and businesses alike in the last few years, but especially now as we rapidly shift to remote learning. This is one of the best ways to convince your professors to transcribe their lectures as ensuring every student has access to equal opportunities at your college or university is a compelling driving force for change. If you’re a professor looking to increase the accessibility of your course and cater to different styles of learning, transcribing your lectures is a simple and efficient way to do it. Allowing access to a written version of your lecture to review post-lesson increases the comprehension of your teaching to all of your students. This will let you reach more students and effectively teach to the ones you have, no matter their abilities or learning style.
Switch Students’ Focus
Professors are all very familiar with the struggle of keeping their students’ attention, and at-home distractions are no help. A great tool to keep learners engaged is to make notes for your lesson publicly available so that students can shift their focus from writing to retaining the things you’re teaching them. Transcribing your lectures allows students to focus on the lesson at hand without frantically trying to take notes. This is especially critical in a remote environment because if someone is falling behind, remote learning will make it difficult to spot. The person giving a lecture will likely be the last to realize that a student is falling behind from their end of a zoom call. If you’re a student, this can be a huge reason to pitch automated transcriptions to your teachers, because with them you will all be able to stay caught up with ease.
Save Yourself Time
An automatically transcribed lecture allows professors to give students, TAs, and anyone else involved in their course access to their lessons with the click of a button. This will save you time in the long run as students will have full access to the information at hand, and will therefore have fewer questions during your lessons (or the night leading up to the exam, for that matter). This will also save time when coordinating with TAs to prepare for lectures as everything you plan to teach is already typed out for you. Ultimately, recording and transcribing your lectures will allow you to create repeatable lesson plans without any of the work you previously put in to manually type them out. This is beneficial to both students and professors alike because students end up getting the most out of these courses, and professors have to put in very little work to provide it.
Overall, transcribing your lectures during this already tumultuous time is going to ease the transition into this new remote semester all around. If you’re a student looking to introduce your professors to the life-changing magic of automatically transcribed audio, simply send them this article. We’re happy to take it from there!