Case Study: Irvine Valley College boosts student success and retention with Otter.ai

Supporting Student Success & Retention with Otter Note-Taking at Irvine Valley College

Irvine Valley College, a public college within the California Community Colleges system, needed better ways to support a diverse student population that includes ESL, deaf, and hard-of-hearing learners, as well as students who benefit from flexible note-taking and captions. The college explored Otter.ai and its Otter note-taking and transcription capabilities to help make instruction more accessible, especially as remote learning expanded during the pandemic.

Otter.ai was implemented with Zoom integration to provide live captions, searchable transcripts, and collaborative note-taking for faculty, staff, and students. The results were strong: users returned semester after semester, one session was praised as the best in over two years, and Irvine Valley College reported close to 1 million minutes of transcription since October 2020. Otter.ai helped improve student success and retention while requiring little training and offering a cost-effective solution per student.

Irvine Valley College

Tim Van Norman

Instructional Technologist