College Courses

There are certain things that add value to college courses, assist non-visual learners who comprise the bulk of classroom settings, and generally serve as learning aids. Transcription is one of these. For those students taking college courses transcription adds value to students and schools in a number of ways even with nationwide budget constraints in both the public and private sectors.  

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 notes taken by college course students typically include less than 50% of the ideas presented and the amount of content recorded varies systematically with college course performance.  

One way to increase the benefits of the review of notes is to provide college course students with a higher quality set of notes. Researchers have assessed the value of providing complete college course notes and they describe this resource as instructor notes. In actual courses, college course 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 shown that when a delay follows initial presentation, college course students are better off reviewing 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 addition, the demands of creating a quality written account of a lecture and comprehending the lecture overextend the attentional capacity of some students, especially visual or tactile learners. In applied settings, providing college course students with notes to replace or supplement notes they might take themselves could potentially improve performance by freeing attentional capacity during presentations and by improving the quality of the record students have available for review.

What this means for college courses is immense. In today’s technological world, those professors and teachers willing to transcribe their audio lectures and lessons provide an aid to students that can be made available online or in text. The versatility of the internet and todays hardware including smartphones and laptops, mean that access to lessons can happen anywhere, anytime. This is something online and correspondence learners have already known for a long time.

Audio lessons and transcriptions aren’t the only aids that technology is making universally available to college course students. Today college courses employ a number of tools that weren’t dreamed of a few short years ago. Cloud storage is also changing the face of college course education. Textbooks and activities stored in a cloud give students easier access to learning resources. Textbook publishers are finding ways to make cloud-powered books easier to adopt. For teachers of college courses cloud computing saves time by automatically grading tests taken online helping to identify students who need help.

The biggest hurdle to even bigger and better tech aids in college courses is as always money, but it’s not all doom and gloom. College course professors sometimes receive grants for using technology in the classroom and developing new learning technologies. In some states in the US, it takes bond referendums in order to implement technology at a university level. The taxpayers pay for bonds because the taxpayers vote upon the referendums. Unless the vote is successful, no funds are made available.

Regardless of whether funding is available today, or if college course resource aids are secured right now, the future of tech in colleges and universities is immensely exciting.