Learning Through Multimedia: Automatic Speech Recognition Enhancing Accessibility and Interaction

Lectures can present barriers to learning for many students and although online multimedia materials have become technically easier to create and offer many benefits for learning and teaching, they also can be difficult to access, manage, and exploit. This presentation will explain and demonstrate how automatic speech recognition can enhance the quality of learning and teaching and help ensure that both face to face learning and e-learning is accessible to all through the cost-effective production of synchronised and captioned multimedia. This approach can: support preferred learning and teaching styles and assist those who, for cognitive, physical or sensory reasons, find notetaking difficult; assist learners to manage and search online digital multimedia resources; provide automatic captioning of speech for deaf learners, or for any learner when speech is not available or suitable; assist blind, visually impaired or dyslexic learners to read and search learning material more readily by augmenting synthetic speech with natural recorded real speech; and assist reflection by teachers and learners to improve their spoken communication skills