Exploring Smarter Video Transcription to Support Universal Design for Learning and Cost Savings - Echo360

Higher education institutions share a goal of making learning more accessible to all students. To meet this goal many colleges and universities, including UMass Amherst, have adopted the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework in an effort to design curriculum to serve all learners, regardless of ability, disability, age, gender or background. Modern technologies often play a supporting role in UDL, providing students with multiple modalities such as video, audio, and text. While these technologies can make implementing UDL easier, they can also be costly. Beginning with the Fall 2018 term, an interdisciplinary team of academic technologists, instructional designers, and instructors at UMass Amherst started exploring how classroom video and Echo360's new automated speech recognition (ASR) technology can create a pathway to cost-effective, scalable captioning that can improve accessibility and support universal design.