Audacity

Mary Dey

Medical terminology is one of those courses where you need to learn word parts, how to put words together and also how to take them apart. When you learn (memorize) the word parts, you should be able to understand what almost any medical word means. Another piece of terminology is the pronunciation piece – being able to say the words correctly so you can speak the language. If you can’t speak the language, it’s hard for anyone to have confidence that you know what you’re doing, even though you may otherwise be very competent clinically.

When I was first developing the online medical terminology course, I was worried about how to handle the pronunciation piece of the course. Of course, I immediately went to my resource go-to person, Marylan. I’’m techno-challenged in many respects, so knowing who to go-to is high on my list. Right off, Audacity was brought out, dusted off and demonstrated for me as an option to phone calling or having students drop by for the pronunciation (those very low-tech options were my suggestion). Remember, this is an online class, so students don1’’t want to have to come to campus unless they must; trying to find a way around this was important.

Audacity has worked out extremely well for these students. Instructions are part of the general information in the course –– how to load Lame and Audacity and what needs to be done to send me their file(s). They are instructed to contact the Computer Lab people if they need help. A word list is posted for each unit of instruction and the student chooses ten words from each unit to record, convert into an mp3 file and send me. From anywhere, I can listen to their pronunciation, evaluate it for correctness, enter the grade they earned and make comments as needed. It has been a GREAT way to deal with the pronunciation piece of the course. We have had a couple minor issues –– one student forgets to convert her file(s) to mp3 format and, on rare occasions, another person’’s file is not understandable because it’’s very faint when played or someone speaks too fast for me to really understand what they’’re trying to tell me – even with the list. We’’ve been using this for about 3 years now and I’’d say that overall, it’’s worked exceptionally well.