University of Glasgow

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

In a Nutshell

University of Glasgow’s College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences Digital Education team has traded in automatic transcription tools which required manual editing. They're now saving significant time by using Verbit to offer materials for online distance programs, which are captioned and transcribed in the necessary UK English. The courses now offer learning content in alternative formats to account for students’ various learning style preferences.

The Challenges

University of Glasgow, MVLS Digital Education team was facing new UK accessibility guidelines and also wanted to offer its online course materials in alternative formats to meet different learning styles of students. Glasgow's MVLS Digital Education team needed a solution to improve on its use of automatic transcription and captioning tools that relied on American English rather than the necessary UK English. They also needed to reduce the time and resources being dedicated to manual editing of transcripts.

Time-consuming and laborious for small team to check and edit free, automatic transcripts

Need to meet new UK accessibility guidelines and use tool offering UK English

Need to change an ad hoc captioning and transcription process for online classes

Desire to offer alternative formats for different learning styles & preferences

"A 20-minute video may have taken us three or four hours to edit an automatic transcript, so Verbit's a real time saver for us, and we see that as a great benefit. Verbit really takes the pressure off the team because I think when we're turning things around super fast, having to also do the transcript is quite a laborious job. It's great to be able to outsource that. I know that does involve money and paying for that, but we very much see it as value for money."

Jenny CrowDigital Education Team Manager (MVLS), University of Glasgow

The Results

Benefiting students with and without disability needs

“We see it as a benefit for all students, not just those have accessibility needs. It’s great for those that English is their second language, or it may be that it’s a learning style preference for students to read the transcript or to watch the closed captions instead of listening to the audio. We really want to give students that choice.”

Download of different caption types

“You can download the SRT. You can download the VTT. Different media platforms want different things. Also, there’s the option to download the Word or a text-based document, so you don’t have to spend the time converting it to different formats, which I found really helpful because we have different media servers and they both want different things. So, to have that flexibility has been really helpful for us.”

Smooth deadline delivery

“The process with Verbit, we have two definite turnaround times. We have a 24 hours or a three-day. They do match those timescales, which is really great.”

Dedicated customer support & onboarding

“We have quite a tight procurement process with our university, so it took a while to get to the point where we had a contract with Verbit. We also had specific terms that our legal team wanted to change in the contract, and Verbit was quite accommodative for that. That was really helpful to us as a university.”

Ability to handle technical course terminology

“Some of our content has quite technical terms in it, there’s medical terms. It’s really great that Verbit is able to cope with that. We really appreciate the level of accuracy that comes back.”