EventRecast
For online lectures

Live captions for every lecture, on every device

Make lectures accessible to international students, students with hearing differences, and students who learn better when they can read along. Captions become a searchable transcript students return to before exams.

An online lecture is the rare format where the audience needs to absorb dense material in real time, often in a second language, often while taking notes, often while distracted by everything else on a laptop. Captions don't replace the lecture — they make the lecture work for the student in the way the student actually learns.

Universities, corporate training teams, and online education platforms use EventRecast to caption recurring lectures without changing the lecturer's workflow. The same recording the instructor already does is now captioned live, transcribed automatically, and turned into a searchable study artifact for every student in the cohort.

Why education teams add captions to online lectures

Support every learner

International students, students with hearing differences, neurodiverse learners, and students with attention disorders all benefit from being able to read along while listening.

A study artifact for free

The transcript becomes a searchable reference students can use to find the exact moment a concept was explained — the modern equivalent of a well-indexed textbook.

Lectures in any language

Real-time translation lets a single English lecture serve students whose first language is Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, or Portuguese. One instructor, one recording, multiple language tracks.

Section 508 and WCAG ready

Live captions are a baseline requirement for many institutional accessibility programs. EventRecast aligns with WCAG 2.2 captioned-media criteria out of the box.

Auto-generated study summaries

Each lecture ships with an AI summary and topic tags — useful as a recap email or a syllabus reference for the lecture index.

Search across the whole semester

When every lecture is transcribed, students can search across an entire course's worth of material to find a single concept, citation, or example.

How to caption an online lecture

  1. Create the lecture event

    Set up the lecture (or the whole course) in the dashboard. Each session has its own viewer link, but they can be grouped under a course for easy student navigation.

  2. Lecture as you normally would

    On the instructor laptop, click Start. The mic picks up speech; captions stream to every student who has the viewer link. The lecture format — whiteboard, slides, screen share — doesn't change.

  3. Publish the transcript and summary

    When the lecture ends, click Stop. The transcript and AI summary are immediately available. Drop them into the course LMS or share the link as the canonical study reference.

Captions are not just for accessibility — they're how modern students study

When researchers ask students whether they use captions, the result is consistent: a majority of students with no hearing impairment use captions when available. The reasons are mundane but compounding: noisy environments, fast lecturers, second-language listeners, complex vocabulary, the simple reality that reading and listening together encodes better than listening alone. The accessibility framing is correct, but it understates the real audience. Captions are how students study now.

When transcripts are searchable and persistent, they become the highest-utility artifact a course produces. A student preparing for an exam can search 'photosynthesis Calvin cycle' across the entire semester's lectures and land on the exact two minutes where the instructor explained it. That's a fundamentally different study experience from re-watching a 50-minute video on 1.5x speed.

Internationalization without dubbing

Universities and corporate L&D teams increasingly run programs across multiple regions. Translating recorded lectures is expensive; translating live lectures used to be impossible at any reasonable cost. Live caption translation closes that gap: the same English lecture serves a Spanish-speaking cohort in Latin America, a Mandarin-speaking cohort in China, and an Arabic-speaking cohort in the Middle East — without rerecording, without subtitling, without dubbing budgets.

The student-facing experience is the same in every language: open the viewer link, choose your language, watch captions appear in real time. The instructor doesn't change anything; the platform does the translation invisibly.

Working with your existing LMS

EventRecast doesn't replace your LMS. It complements it. The viewer link can be embedded directly inside Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, or whatever lecture-delivery tool the course already uses, so students never leave the institutional environment to access captions. The downloadable transcript and SRT/VTT files plug into existing recording archives without extra workflow.

For instructors, that means no new tool to learn — captions become a checkbox at the start of the lecture and a bonus artifact at the end of it. For institutions, it means accessibility coverage that scales without a corresponding scale in support staff.

Frequently asked questions

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