Using audio files in courses

Submitted by Anonymous on September 3, 2005 - 12:16pm.

To answer your question: should we podcast just because we can? In my experience of podcasting lectures since February, I think the answer is yes if it can be incorporated as part of your class materials with little additional effort. The reason I started podcasting was to accomodate a student who had difficulty viewing the lecture screencasts from home. By supplying the pdfs of the notes to follow along, I was able to provide an information channel in addition to the screencast to suit that student. RSS subscription data tells me that podcasting is used by few students when screencasts are available. Where you would run into serious problems is to try to use podcasting as the ONLY delivery system.

Jean-Claude's comments and

Submitted by Henry E. Schaffer (North Carolina State University) on November 6, 2005 - 7:00pm.

Jean-Claude's comments and the Trackback share a common theme - opening an additional "channel" can help students. There are many reasons why a diversity of channels help - learning styles/preferences, portability, time-shifting, ..., so we can often help by providing these diverse channels.

Perhaps I'm being too accomodating - if so, it's in reaction to the school attitude of my youth which was "Learn it the way I learned it."

The major limitation is the resources taken to add channels - we have a limited resource base. The advances in technology I mentioned earlier allow adding audio rather easily.

I'm participating in a luncheon seminar this week with 3 others - we're dealing with the use of audio, and other channels, and will cover both the technology available now and coming down the pike, and also the pedagogical aspects. I'm looking forward to this session.

Two weeks ago I participated

Submitted by Henry E. Schaffer (North Carolina State University) on November 24, 2005 - 12:34pm.

Two weeks ago I participated in a seminar/workshop "Give Me the Mike: Digital Audio Recording for Education" in which I presented along with Alton Banks and Maria Droujkova of our Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning and Hal Meeks, a multimedia specialist in our IT Division.

The idea was to pay equal attention to the pedagogy and the technology. and we managed to pay as much attention to, e.g., the "telling of stories" aspect of teaching math and science as we did to the "neat gadgets" and how to use them. My "notes" are at http://www.ncsu.edu/it/open_source/audio.html Feel free to look them over - comments and suggestions are always welcome.

We did not have time to go into the Accessibility aspects of using audio. I hope to have time to test Dragon Naturally Speaking for preparing transcripts of these mp3 files. Has anyone already checked this out?

Some more thoughts on

Submitted by Henry E. Schaffer (North Carolina State University) on December 19, 2005 - 7:25pm.

Some more thoughts on accessibility. I'm so used to thinking about audio as the accessibility method for people with visual disabilities - as an add on to text - that I'm not sufficiently aware of the accessibility barrier of audio to people with hearing disabilities. But with the great ease of making audio files as the initial format, and with the explosion of technology for moving them around and playing them, it becomes more important to provide an equivalent non-audio format.

I hear that Dragon Naturally Speaking v. 8 is the leading speech -> text transcription software - and at their side http://www.dragontalk.com/NATURAL.htm there is a claim of "accuracy up to 99%". That is fantastic, if accurate (yes, I notice the weasel words "up to" :-). Not that you can speak "without pausing between words".

While it still has to be trained - I can imagine it being used by a person who repeats the content of an audio file - which would allow transcription at (nearly) a 1:1 rate. If proofreading and a small amount of correction is added in, that still may allow the production of transcripts in less time and requiring less skill than any of the previous methods!

I think I'm talking myself into actually trying this out! Can't anyone save me from this work?

I discussed this

Submitted by Henry E. Schaffer (North Carolina State University) on January 2, 2006 - 8:19am.

I discussed this "transcription by repeating" with a colleague (Saroj Primlani who is Coordinator of University IT Accessibility at NCSU - her web resource page) and she said this is well known as "shadowing".

Searching shows a number of resources discussing this technique, e.g. http://tap.gallaudet.edu/SpeechRecog.htm and a nice (long) article at http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/443/bain.html

The bottom line is that this appears to be an economical and effective method for producing transcripts of audio material. Therefore. I should stop wondering and start doing a pilot. :-)

This doesn't take care of the synchronization needed for the audio track in multimedia material, but that's not a concern for audio-only files.

		Using audio files in courses Created by Henry E. Schaffer (North Carolina State University) on August 31, 2005 It used to take equipment, software, and a technician to make an audio file which could be put on the web or played in class. Today's technology now makes this much easier and inexpensive. It is now possible to record from a microphone, a line-in, or from a radio station directly into mp3 files, and click/drag them as needed. All without the assistance of a technician. So now it is easy to use audio files in the classroom, or in the online portion of a course. Where should this be done? One obvious place is when an audio (vs. text) area is of interest - e.g. music, animal calls, etc. Another area has to do with "learning style" preferences. I prefer to read text rather than to listen to text, but I can do either. Some people prefer to listen, and some have a lot of trouble reading, but listening isn't a problem for them. Is this a reason to provide alternatives? It is easy - but should it be done? If so, where and under what conditions? I've got questions - do you have answers? --henry P.S. The technology I'm using is a Pogo Products Radio Your Way LX ( http://www.pogoproducts.com/radioyourway.html ) and Audacity software for editing (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ - Open Source software.) I've been very happy with these, but there are many alternatives and tradeoffs. Accessibility \| annotation \| Audio \| mp3 \| Pedagogy Henry's blog Login or register to post comments 6174 reads To answer your question: Submitted by Anonymous on September 3, 2005 - 12:16pm. To answer your question: should we podcast just because we can? In my experience of podcasting lectures since February, I think the answer is yes if it can be incorporated as part of your class materials with little additional effort. The reason I started podcasting was to accomodate a student who had difficulty viewing the lecture screencasts from home. By supplying the pdfs of the notes to follow along, I was able to provide an information channel in addition to the screencast to suit that student. RSS subscription data tells me that podcasting is used by few students when screencasts are available. Where you would run into serious problems is to try to use podcasting as the ONLY delivery system. Login or register to post comments Jean-Claude's comments and Submitted by Henry E. Schaffer (North Carolina State University) on November 6, 2005 - 7:00pm. Jean-Claude's comments and the Trackback share a common theme - opening an additional "channel" can help students. There are many reasons why a diversity of channels help - learning styles/preferences, portability, time-shifting, ..., so we can often help by providing these diverse channels. Perhaps I'm being too accomodating - if so, it's in reaction to the school attitude of my youth which was "Learn it the way I learned it." The major limitation is the resources taken to add channels - we have a limited resource base. The advances in technology I mentioned earlier allow adding audio rather easily. I'm participating in a luncheon seminar this week with 3 others - we're dealing with the use of audio, and other channels, and will cover both the technology available now and coming down the pike, and also the pedagogical aspects. I'm looking forward to this session. Login or register to post comments Two weeks ago I participated Submitted by Henry E. Schaffer (North Carolina State University) on November 24, 2005 - 12:34pm. Two weeks ago I participated in a seminar/workshop "Give Me the Mike: Digital Audio Recording for Education" in which I presented along with Alton Banks and Maria Droujkova of our Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning and Hal Meeks, a multimedia specialist in our IT Division. The idea was to pay equal attention to the pedagogy and the technology. and we managed to pay as much attention to, e.g., the "telling of stories" aspect of teaching math and science as we did to the "neat gadgets" and how to use them. My "notes" are at http://www.ncsu.edu/it/open_source/audio.html Feel free to look them over - comments and suggestions are always welcome. We did not have time to go into the Accessibility aspects of using audio. I hope to have time to test Dragon Naturally Speaking for preparing transcripts of these mp3 files. Has anyone already checked this out? Login or register to post comments Some more thoughts on Submitted by Henry E. Schaffer (North Carolina State University) on December 19, 2005 - 7:25pm. Some more thoughts on accessibility. I'm so used to thinking about audio as the accessibility method for people with visual disabilities - as an add on to text - that I'm not sufficiently aware of the accessibility barrier of audio to people with hearing disabilities. But with the great ease of making audio files as the initial format, and with the explosion of technology for moving them around and playing them, it becomes more important to provide an equivalent non-audio format. I hear that Dragon Naturally Speaking v. 8 is the leading speech -> text transcription software - and at their side http://www.dragontalk.com/NATURAL.htm there is a claim of "accuracy up to 99%". That is fantastic, if accurate (yes, I notice the weasel words "up to" :-). Not that you can speak "without pausing between words". While it still has to be trained - I can imagine it being used by a person who repeats the content of an audio file - which would allow transcription at (nearly) a 1:1 rate. If proofreading and a small amount of correction is added in, that still may allow the production of transcripts in less time and requiring less skill than any of the previous methods! I think I'm talking myself into actually trying this out! Can't anyone save me from this work? Login or register to post comments I discussed this Submitted by Henry E. Schaffer (North Carolina State University) on January 2, 2006 - 8:19am. I discussed this "transcription by repeating" with a colleague (Saroj Primlani who is Coordinator of University IT Accessibility at NCSU - her web resource page) and she said this is well known as "shadowing". Searching shows a number of resources discussing this technique, e.g. http://tap.gallaudet.edu/SpeechRecog.htm and a nice (long) article at http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/443/bain.html The bottom line is that this appears to be an economical and effective method for producing transcripts of audio material. Therefore. I should stop wondering and start doing a pilot. :-) This doesn't take care of the synchronization needed for the audio track in multimedia material, but that's not a concern for audio-only files. Login or register to post comments
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