About Liberated Learning
It was 120 years ago that Alexander Graham Bell, who had strong ties to Nova Scotia in Atlantic Canada, began experimenting with speech recognition to help the Deaf. It seems fitting that a Nova Scotia university assumed a leadership role in advancing speech recognition to help persons with disabilities in the classroom and beyond.
The Liberated Learning Concept
The Liberated Learning concept may revolutionize the way
students and professors interact in a university environment.
It has the potential to spark exciting and unprecedented outcomes
for both students and faculty.
The Liberated Learning concept is founded on two interrelated applications:
- using speech recognition technology to automatically transcribe spoken language and display it as readable text, and
- using speech recognition to produce accessible, multimedia notes
Partnership, sharing, and transfer of knowledge to new organizations are core principles that strengthen and support a concept that began as an isolated pilot in one Canadian university, and quickly burgeoned into a far-reaching international group of universities in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Europe and the Far East. This international consortium works toward a common mission:
The advancement of speech recognition technology and techniques to create and foster barrier-free learning environments where all students have equal access to information.
Phase I: The Liberated Learning Pilot Project
The Atlantic Centre of Research, Access, and Support for Students with Disabilities at Saint Mary's University in Halifax has been responding to the needs of students with disabilities since 1985. A major thrust of the Centre's response is to understand the role technology plays in mediating the integration of persons with disabilities into higher education.
Since its inception, the Atlantic Centre has advocated and advanced the use of technology to level the playing field for its students. For the past decade the Atlantic Centre has carefully and critically watched the development of speech recognition technology, believing that one day that technology may revolutionize the learning experience for students with disabilities. The introduction of true continuous speech recognition software with large, expandable vocabularies engendered a commitment from Saint Mary's to explore the concept further. Thus, a world first initiative - the Liberated Learning Pilot Project was born.
In the fall of 1998, three Saint Mary's professors utilized speech recognition software (Voice-to-Text) in their classrooms for one semester. The instructors developed a personalized voice profile by "teaching" speech recognition software to understand his or her speech.
Once the intensive training process was complete, the professors moved to the classroom, donned wireless microphones that transmitted to a robust computer system running speech recognition software modified for this application. Liberated Learning had now been introduced into the lecture environment.
This custom software first digitized the spoken lectures, while simultaneously translating the speech into text, and then displayed the text on a large screen at the front of the classroom. Students could not only hear the lecture, but also see the lecture as it was delivered. More importantly, after the lecture, comprehensive, software-generated notes were provided in a variety of formats.
Phase II: The Liberated Learning Project
The initial testing of this application for speech recognition was enlightening. This brief exposure to the concept suggested it could indeed provide an alternative to conventional note taking for students with disabilities. Serendipitously, non disabled students were using the instantaneous display of the lecture as a reference check for their own notes: the concept gave all students access to both auditory and visual learning channels, helping them better integrate the lecture content. Students could use the software-generated notes to embellish or augment their own notes. Therefore the successful application of speech recognition technology was seen to have valuable implications for every student in the classroom.
With funding from the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation, Saint Mary's University and the Atlantic Centre led a global team of university and industry partners in a three-year development of the Liberated Learning concept.
Between 1999 and 2002, the Liberated Learning Project created and managed numerous inter-university partnerships and corporate collaborative agreements. The complexity of these relationships grew as the project scope expanded from a proof of concept pilot to a tightly defined formal research investigation. The original three year grant transitioned into the Liberated Learning Initiative.
Phase III: The Liberated Learning Consortium
The challenge of project sustainability and expansion beyond the Liberated Learning Project (LLP), and subsequently the Liberated Learning Initiative (LLI), was a core discussion point at the 2001 Baddeck Symposium  (QuickTime), an international gathering of project researchers from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, which was held at the Alexander Graham Bell Centre in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Dr. David Leitch, the Director of Liberated Learning, introduced the concept of a next generation initiative in response to this challenge. Thus Liberated Learning continues today as a consortium of university and industry partners, jointly pursuing a mission to make learning more accessible through speech recognition technology. Saint Mary's University hosts a core infrastructure for this initiative based on systems developed during the previous project.
Liberated Learning has also entered into corporate partnerships, most notably with the world's top speech recognition scientists at the IBM - T.J. Watson Research Centre in Yorktown Heights, New York. Liberated Learning is also engaged in an ongoing relationship with RBC Financial Group, Canada.
This partner-centric organization will advance, expand, and share information about the Liberated Learning concept in multiple venues. Visit the Consortium, Projects, and Technology pages for more information.
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