My name is Teresa McCoy and I work as an Assistant Director of University of Maryland Extension (UME) with responsibility for evaluation and assessment. Like many Extension colleagues, my evaluation department consisted of me until last year when I was able to hire an additional person. The two of us have responsibility across all program areas in our organization, and I am always looking for technologies that can help save time while adding quality to evaluation efforts.
This past year, I needed to conduct about 25 interviews. I was faced with hours of conversation that would have to be transcribed and analyzed without assistants to help.
Several people suggested, given that I’m at a university, to “Just hire an undergraduate student. It shouldn’t cost you very much that way.” Well, I don’t know about you, but if I have spent countless hours preparing questions, designing a protocol, and contacting and scheduling interviews, I am not about to hand over transcription duties to the first student “off the street.”
Football solved my problem. I know that’s hard to believe, but while I was at a Baltimore Ravens football game party with friends, I was chatting with an education policy analyst. She told me about TranscribeMe!™ and her good experiences with the company and the product.
Lesson Learned: Hot tips and rad resources often are found at unlikely places!
Lesson Learned: After some investigation, I found out that TranscribeMe!™ and NVivo™ have a business partnership. I was able to upload my audio recordings from within NVivo™ (after setting up my account) and the transcripts were then sent back to me and into my NVivo™ project file. In the media options, there is a “purchase transcript” option.
To clarify, you can use TranscribeMe!™ without having to use NVivo™. However, given that I was using NVivo™ for my coding, these two products made the initial work a lot easier and faster. I received some of the transcripts within 24 hours and almost all of them within 48. The transcript quality was excellent. And, as I am sure you’re wondering, the price was good (Price is negotiable depending on quantity of work, number of speakers, and other options.)
You can use the app on your smart phone to record. No special equipment needed.
Rad Resource: TranscribeMe!™ and NVivo™ partnership. TranscribeMe!™ at www.transcribeme.com
Rad Resource: Information from QSR about using NVivo and TranscribeMe!™ http://www.qsrinternational.com/products_nvivo_transcription-services.aspx
If you’re a football fan like me, now you have a great excuse to watch the games because you never know when you’ll find your new evaluation rad resource!
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Extension Education Evaluation (EEE) TIG Week with our colleagues in the EEE AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our EEE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.
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