The purpose of this research is to establish if students exposed to speech recognition technology (SR) within the lecture theatre environment and who receive a transcript of the lecture perceive an improvement in academic integration during their first year of higher education. The Liberated Learning Project is a world-first, action research project, developing a speech recognition technology application for use in lecture theatres to remove barriers to participation for those students, who for whatever reason, have difficulty in taking lecture notes. Further the technology can be used simultaneously to display text on-line and generate material for use in distance education. It is argued that incorporating speech recognition as an additional augmentative approach to student learning experiences may stem student attrition in the first year of higher education.