Many years ago the process of collecting and processing academic content was not only tedious, but not affordable for everyone.
It required an audio recorder, hours and hours of taking notes on the recording and many more hours of sorting, classifying and compiling data and information.
Thanks to today's mobile recording capabilities, coupled with the enormous value of manual and automated academic and research transcription services, this process has become very beneficial and easy to implement for students and researchers.
It is no longer necessary to go crazy trying to understand what a professor is saying while taking notes of everything so as not to miss anything, or having to rewind the recorder hundreds of times to get through the audio without errors.
The benefits of academic transcription are many and I'll tell you about them below. Let's get started!
The main reasons why to use transcription in academic research
The use of transcription for educational purposes, such as transcribing classes, conferences, group projects, lessons, focus groups or other types of educational media, is called pedagogical or academic transcription.
This is in addition to transcription for academic research, which in turn includes personal and group interviews with certain actors in qualitative research.
Here are the main reasons why you should use transcription for your research.
1. Students can focus on learning
Academic transcription will help you to be 100% focused on what the teacher or lecturer is saying.
This is great, since you will be able to record the class and transcribe it later, getting first-hand information without missing any detail.
Students can now concentrate on their lessons without worrying about missing something important or losing their notes, as all study material has already been documented and organised through academic transcription.
Today, the study of notes in the notebook or the reading of textbooks has been taken over, or even surpassed, by other, more technical forms of study.
Videos, for example, are often very useful, even more so when they include a transcription and subtitles in the chosen language for a better understanding and learning process.
Listening, watching and reading at the same time makes the learning process much more powerful and helps students remember everything better.
2. Benefits students with disabilities
If we talk about students who have some kind of hearing impairment, the transcripts of the lectures will not only help them to understand but also, they will feel more valued.
Not to mention that for students without hearing impairment, but with other or no other limitations, they also benefit from transcription.
Students with organizational problems, or perhaps who are very slow at writing notes, in addition to those with greater difficulties, for them transcription is an incredible ally.
3. Can be referred back to at a later date
If a student records a class or lecture and then transcribes it, he can go back to the sources as many times as he wants.
He can simply open the academic transcript file in the computer's browser, or print it out and review what was said.
Whenever you want, you can re-read the transcript, or the part of the transcript that interests you, and refresh your knowledge.
Best of all, you can upload it to a Drive or share it with your colleagues, which will allow you not only to work together more efficiently, but also to find what you are looking for at the speed of light.
4. Distractions will not be fatal
Keeping track of everything during a group discussion, along with all the important points, debates, ideas, among others, can be difficult and confusing unless someone takes careful notes.
In fact, many times when trying to write down crucial ideas, students can lose focus, causing additional confusion and hindering the progress of the project.
This is where educational transcription for future reference comes in notoriously handy.
Having the recording device record everything that happens during the group project and then transcribing it will ensure that everyone has the same information and can continue to put the project together without delay.
5. Much better organization and better learning
Classes in general, and even more so when they are university classes, sometimes do not give rise to good and thorough discussions. This causes many students to simply take notes with pencil and paper.
If you have excellent penmanship and patience, they will surely be very useful, however, if this is not your case, you will probably end up asking for notes from a classmate's good faith.
This is why it is important to record and transcribe lectures, as you will be able to know in detail what each and every participant in the discussion is saying.
If the teacher allows it, you can use the printed notes and transcripts in the exam test, and this whether you like it or not is a great help to increase your grades.
That said, if for some reason you miss class or must withdraw, getting the transcript will allow you to stay current and up to date with the course.
If you use it for final projects, as many students have used ScriptMe to do, you can record interviews and then transcribe them to do the best research possible.
You will be allowed to include it in the appendices and it will also serve to show how hard you have worked.
Manual transcription, done by a knowledgeable person, is ideal in this case, but it can be extremely costly and take longer than expected.
This is why automatic transcription tools such as ScriptMe are often used for academic research, as they offer a very good level of accuracy, at a much lower price and with almost instantaneous speed.
6. Saves you a lot of time and work
It seems clear that transcribing audios for your research or academic project is very beneficial.
Even more so if we take into account that it allows you to save a great deal of time and work, avoiding that you are glued to the recording going back and forth so as not to miss anything.
The automatic academic transcription allows you to transcribe the audio to text in just a few minutes, being able to edit it and make the necessary corrections.
What would take hours, you'll have it ready and ready as a bibliographic source in moments.
And the tool does it for you!
7. The information is 100% reliable and first hand
In the case of quantitative data, researchers can learn the numbers and metrics once the research is completed.
The numbers are highlighted and trends can be seen and conclusions drawn.
This is not always the case with qualitative data, especially when recorded digitally.
Before conducting qualitative research, a researcher must complete a significant amount of work.
And finally, in order to know reliable results or to test hypotheses, many factors and sources must be weighed.
Research transcription provides access to high quality texts, facilitating the analysis of findings.
Effective transcripts show qualitative data, which ultimately allows researchers to detect patterns, anomalies and data tracking, among other features.
3 Best tools for Academic Transcriptions
There are excellent software for academic transcription. Here are my recommendations.
1. ScriptMe
The best online tool for research transcription is ScriptMe.
The accuracy of our artificial intelligence is really powerful, coupled with the speed of processing, the easy to understand interface and the ability to edit the transcript yourself, make it a more than ideal choice for your research.
If there is something that makes us stand out from other companies that offer academic transcription services, it is our fast, responsive and energetic support, something you don't find so much in other tools of this kind.
Also the price is affordable and the possibility to try the tool for free, are features that our university clients highlight to us.
This is the case of Mikkel Mogensen, student of Dalum Academy of Agricultural Business in Denmark, who did his final research with ScriptMe and told us the following:
...During my research I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to interview some of the leading researchers in this field and ended up with more than two hours of recordings, of which my final exam has been based, which is a critical part of the whole process, and I must be able to ensure I got from the sources that I say I have. This is where I have to use transcription.
Here’s how ScriptMe saved my project from failing.
During all these interviews I’ve gathered a lot of empiricism which would have taken me hours if not days to transcribe would it not have been for ScripMe, which is a very simple program to use, even for a farmer from Denmark.
All I had to do was to drag and drop my recording, wait for the surprisingly quick transcription, and then it would give me exactly what I needed, it even had the timestamps for all the conversations where as with other programs I’ve tried, they would only give you a big block of text that you then would have to filter though only to make a guess where the sentence starts and ends which for a couple of hours of recording and a tight schedule consumes more time than one would like.
ScriptMe made everything much easier and with it being so simple to use and feasible to get the interviews into my exam...
Thanks Mikkel, we love your review.
2. Happy Scribe
What to say about Happy Scribe?
They are one of the most recognized and used transcription platforms in the market.
It is a very powerful tool that allows transcription in more than 60 languages and many large companies choose their services.
Not only do they offer the possibility of automatic transcription, but they also have "human made" transcription in some languages.
3. Veed.io
Veed.io is one of the most powerful video editing tools. That said, its feature for transcribing audio or video to text is also one of the most successful and powerful on the market.
While the tool is not purely a transcription tool like ScriptMe and Happy Scribe, the results are still very good.
The huge number of users and happy customers that it has would not let us lie.
Undoubtedly, a very good alternative to ScriptMe for research transcriptions.
Conclusions
Academic transcription brings multiple benefits to your life as a student or researcher.
Even more so when it comes to automatic research transcription, since it allows you to save a lot of time that you would spend going through the audios.
It also allows you to have all the information organized and easily accessible for when you want to review the sources.
Another great advantage is that it allows you to concentrate only on the speaker or teacher, avoiding distractions and taking notes, since you will have them later when you transcribe the audio in an instant with a tool like ScriptMe.
Finally, also for those students with hearing problems or with physical or cognitive limitations, transcription can be essential to follow a course or research autonomously and with the best possible fluency.
Have you used transcription in your academic life, and I'd love to hear how it went for you?
