Presented by:
Olin Bjork, Assistant Professor of English

In an online course, student engagement increases when an instructor’s virtual presence increases. One way to be more virtually present to students is to use audio or video for lectures and/or lessons. To make these recordings accessible to students with disabilities, captions can be added to video and transcripts to audio. In multimedia learning research, this approach is called “verbal redundancy” because the words spoken in the audio or video are identical to those in the onscreen text. Although experimental studies, including one that I conducted during the spring 2018 semester, have not shown that verbal redundancy increases student comprehension of course material, they have shown that students prefer multimodal lectures and lessons.

In my online courses, I provide a transcript with the video lectures, not just the audio lectures, because through tracking and surveys I have found that while some students watch or listen to the lectures, others read them, and still others read and watch or listen simultaneously. In this conference session, I will briefly discuss research findings on verbal redundancy and then demonstrate tools and techniques for creating transcripts and integrating them with audio or video, including how to make an “interactive transcript” that allows students to navigate the audio or video by means of the transcript and vice versa.