Otter.ai reveals that its Otter for Education technology offering is being deployed across dozens of universities and community colleges, and used by over 100,000 students for remote learning and academic accessibility purposes. In an ever-evolving learning environment, Otter.ai lecture notes are being deployed and used for remote learning across entire colleges and universities or in select departments or colleges, in a variety of remote educational deployments – from virtual to hybrid, to on-site. The offering is available over Zoom and other online video lecturing platforms.
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California State University (CSU), Chico is deploying Otter for Education to its entire teaching faculty for the upcoming Fall semester. Faculty members using Otter for Education will capture and share lecture notes in real-time with their students.
“Learning at CSU is evolving quickly due to the current environment. With this full rollout of Otter.ai’s technology, our faculty can now capture and share lecture notes in real-time with their students,” said Jeremy Olguin, Accessible Technology Manager at CSU. “With the fall semester just around the corner, our aim is to empower our faculty to help all students to get a better learning experience and we also want our students to access our changing learning environment in a way that’s most efficient and effective for them. This is the challenge facing the vast majority of learning institutions right now, especially with lectures likely to be taking place in a hybrid mix of on-site and virtual classrooms for the foreseeable future.”
“COVID-19 has challenged universities to fundamentally reexamine how their students learn, with remote learning creating a new frontier for their educators,” said Sam Liang, CEO, and co-founder of Otter.ai. “Otter for Education is at the forefront of this and is creating new ways of learning. Otter.ai lecture notes add huge educational value, by building increased engagement and collaboration between teachers, and students. Ultimately, we believe it improves students’ abilities to learn.”
Another university school using Otter for Education is Warwick Business School in the UK. Currently, it is using Otter’s technology for its online MBA, as well as its joint global master’s program in central banking, run in collaboration with the Bank of England. The school has been listed as the number one online MBA provider by the Financial Times for the last three years running.
“Our teachers are relying on video content to deliver online lessons and Otter.ai gives us the ability to provide accurate transcripts to accompany each video,” said Dot Powell, Director of Teaching and Learning Enhancement at Warwick Business School. “This is proving to be crucial to the learning experience for our online students as it is helping us to create more useful educational resources for them and receives universally good feedback from students.”
Peer note-taking in education has long been plagued with challenges, as students were dependent on others for the quality, consistency, interpretation, and timeliness of their notes. Otter.ai is already used by a host of academic institutions for students who require academic accommodations, including UCLA as well as other universities, community colleges, and Ivy League colleges in the U.S. and abroad.
“UCLA recognized we needed to offer our students with learning disabilities more control over their academic accommodations. We looked beyond peer note takers for a highly accurate, reliable, and easy-to-use app and found Otter.ai,” said Dr. Nickey Woods, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Inclusion & Admissions – Graduate Division and former Director of the Center for Accessibility at UCLA. “Otter Voice Meeting Notes empowers our students with automated live transcription, removes their dependency on others, and enables them to access the learning environment in a way that’s most efficient for them. By enabling students to actively engage in lectures and study groups vs focusing on note-taking, we believe Otter is an important and valuable tool for education.” View UCLA speaking further about using Otter.
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“For students requiring academic assistance, Otter has been an excellent educational tool, especially amongst the hard of hearing and deaf communities within our university,” said Carmen R. Alldredge, Director Disability Services at Southern Utah University. “The COVID-19 pandemic and new mask requirements pose additional challenges for students who also relied on reading lips, as both teachers and fellow students now wear face coverings. Otter has become even more invaluable during this uncertain time to ensure an enhanced education environment for our students.”
What Otter voice lecture notes do
At a time when in-person educational interaction isn’t possible for all, Otter’s technology boosts remote classroom collaboration between teachers and students including:
- Live comments: During lessons, students are able to view a live interactive transcript and can raise questions by adding comments while a lesson is ongoing, in order to seek clarification or more information from their teacher. This is an especially important feature when a lecture is conducted over video conferencing technology and educators’ interactions with a full class of remote students could be minimized.
- Keyword search: Accurate, transcribed lecture notes can be searched by keywords. In addition, Otter auto-generates a collection of keywords at the top of each lecture transcript. With this feature, students can find what they think is the most valuable educational information and can follow up post-lecture with further questions and clarifications from their teacher.
- Embedded educational material: Additional educational material such as slides and images can also be embedded into transcripts to aid students’ learning experience.
Otter generates smart notes that sync audio, text, and images. Users can search, play, edit, organize, and share meeting notes from any device via the Otter Voice Meeting Notes app. The company developed and owns its proprietary stack, including automated speech recognition, speaker separation (diarization) and identification, word synchronization, and summarization. Otter takes user privacy and data security seriously and has a strict privacy policy. View Otter.ai pricing plans and features – check out the Quick Start Guide, or download Otter Voice Meeting Notes now on iOS or Android. View Otter for Education plans and features.