As per the UCL retention policy, any Zoom-recorded content in Lecturecast will be deleted if it meets the following criteria: 

• Zoom recordings that have never been shared with a Lecturecast course section 
• Zoom recordings that have never been viewed.

Staff members impacted by this will be contacted with further details. Should they wish to retain these recordings, they are advised to ensure a copy is stored in their Zoom account, unless they have manually deleted them. Alternatively, a copy of the recording can be downloaded before the 11th March 2024 by following the instruction below.  

• Download the recordings to your local device  

 Please note: Teaching events captured or uploaded to Lecturecast (Echo360) will not be affected. 

If you have any questions regarding this matter, please get in touch with the Lecturecast Support Team and we will respond as promptly as possible. 

From 20th September 2022, media transcripts will be automatically applied to the closed captions track if they meet the 90% confidence score threshold.

We have activated automatic transcription and closed captions by default in Lecturecast as an additional supporting tool to provide fully accessible videos for our students as part of UCL’s digital strategy.

Aside from being an aid to viewers with auditory impairment, transcripts and captions can be extremely useful as a study tool.  Students often search large amounts of text using keywords to pinpoint passages of interest; Lecturecast transcripts, which are searchable and synchronised with the recording, allow similar searches of video presentations.

Lecturecast has built-in ASR (automatic speech recognition) to produce recording transcripts. Transcripts are automatically created for any media uploaded to Lecturecast and are available to viewers once a recording’s audio file has been processed.

Closed Captions use the same ASR file as the transcript but are not available if they do not meet the 90% confidence score threshold or until the ASR file has been ‘applied’ to a recording (until then the CC button in the player will be inactive).

Closed captions will NOT be automatically applied to:

• New recordings with a confidence score lower than 90%
• New Zoom videos automatically transferred to Lecturecast
• Older recordings made prior to the 20th September 2022.

Closed captions can still be manually applied using the ‘apply to CC’ button in the transcript editor after review/corrections are made.

See below an example of what a transcribed lecture with closed captions would look like:

Lecturecast player with both transcripts and closed captions showing

Further information and detailed instructions are available on the ‘Transcripts and closed captions in Lecturecast (ASR)’ mini guide.

Please contact lecturecast@ucl.ac.uk with any questions.