Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Iain Stewart et al.
particular the need to have trained the voice model before use in class) it did provide a useful
resource and the feedback from the students who used the tool was very positive.
Figure 1: Talkshow showing slide and textual material derived from presenter
An interesting output of the Talkshow project was that the hearing students also wanted the transcript
of the lecture made available to them. They found this to be a useful additional resource to add to the
normally supplied lecture slides and notes as it allowed them to refer back to the lecture content and
to follow the flow of the lecture. Similarly, students who had missed the lecture reported that they
found the transcript helpful when read with the slides. To develop these findings further, this work was
extended in 2007 to produce a first version of an integrated lecture resource.
Commercial tools do exits to provide lecture capture. A number of these are what can be described as
enterprise level systems which require a significant infrastructure commitment. (ECHO 360 etc). They
are easy to use but are not normally optimised for portable use but for purpose equipped lecture
rooms. Other products which run on local systems (eg Camtasia) capture all screen interactions that
the presenter makes. This is a powerful resource which allows for multiple forms of presentation to be
captured in a single format and makes it easy to download. As it is focussed on the screen, it can
miss out on some of the interactions of the lecturer such as gestures and other forms of body
language which are often used to reinforce meaning and content.
This product took captured video and presentations together with the live transcribed content and put
them together into a single presentation package which was navigable by the video timeline.(Figure 2)
This product was designed to support the revision of content by students in their own time and also to
support distance learning as the module where it was piloted had a number of students who were not
able to attend the weekly lectures. A class of 50 students were used for the pilot project
Feedback from the students showed that there were significant benefits to the students. The
information was extracted by a questionnaire after a series of 18 lectures, with 25 completed
responses. These were followed up by a series of random follow-up interviews. The key outcomes
were:
The deaf students were highly appreciative of the subtitles, both in the presentation and in the
recording.
Although the subtitles were intended for the deaf, several international students said they helped
them understand the local accent.
803