Synote: Important Enhancements to Learning with Recorded Lectures

This paper explains three new important enhancements to Synote, the freely available, award winning, open source, web based application that makes web hosted recordings easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for learners, teachers and other users. Synote uniquely achieves this through the creation of synchronized notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions, enabling users to easily find, or associate their notes or resources with, any part of a recording available on the web. Students surveyed would like to be able to access all their lectures through Synote. The facility to convert and import narrated PowerPoint PPTX files means that teachers can capture their lectures without requiring institution-wide expensive lecture capture systems. Crowdsourcing correction of speech recognition errors allows for sustainable captioning of the lecture while the development of an integrated mobile speech recognition application enables synchronized live verbal contributions from the class to also be captured through captions.