How TranscribeMe Crowd-Sourced Transcription Adds Value to Schools

Transcribe me is faster, easier, more accurate, and less costly than the market competitors; this has a number of positive benefits. First, I will describe how transcription adds value to schools, even with nationwide budget constraints in both the public and private sectors.

As most people know, the public school system — especially in inner-city districts — has always had a problem with school attendance. Research conducted on the relationship between note-reviewing and positive school performance shows that the two have a very high correlation with each other. On the other hand, research has also shown that transcriptions taken by college students typically include less than 50% of the ideas presented and the amount of content recorded varies systematically with course performance.

One way to increase the benefits of the review of notes is to provide students a higher quality set of notes through a transcription service. Researchers have assessed the value of providing complete notes and may describe this resource as instructor notes. In actual courses, students may also seek to supplement their own notes by reviewing the notes taken by a friend. These students demonstrate a performance advantage.

It has been demonstrated that when a delay followed an initial presentation, students were better off reviewing complete notes without attending the initial lecture than attending the lecture and reviewing their own notes. Instructor notes potentially do more than fill in the gaps in notes generated by the note taker.  In particular, research demonstrates that many college students are poor note takers. In addition, the demands of creating a quality transcription of a lecture and comprehending the lecture overextend the attentional capacity of some. Providing students with transcription notes to replace or supplement notes they take themselves, could improve performance by freeing attentional capacity during presentations and by improving the quality of the record students have available for review.

The implications for these findings are immense. The only problem going forward is determining how transcription is introduced to the education sector. Schools, especially public schools, have relatively low budgets. The answer may be specialized education approaches to transcription. An approach that offers strong incentives to educators could include showing educators they maximizing the benefit to students and that they are able to access and manage their own transcriptions.

Using such a service, teachers and professors will be able to reap more value out of their hours, and impart the knowledge they have to others eager to learn or hear the material. One option could be to record all lectures given in class, and have the transcriptions available via email or a website for student use. The question is, are schools willing to spend money to increase the learning capabilities and resources available to students?

This post was written by Mathew Heldman.