I’ve been listening to Podcasts for about six weeks now, and every once in a while the thought occurs to me that they could be useful in Higher Education, if not the library world. Never got around to drafting my thoughts on the subject, but my colleague D’Arcy just did, so I’ll drop you off there…
I just wanted to capture some possible compelling uses for podcasting in an educational setting.
- Lectures. Imagine students being able to subscribe to an RSS feed, and have recordings of every lecture automatically stored on their hard drive or iPod or whatnot for review. This would remove the need for the dozens of recorders at the front of a large lecture hall, all getting crappy and redundant audio. Why not produce a single quality feed, and let everyone use it? (on a related note – why not share a single high quality set of notes, rather than making lectures a speed-writing test…)
- Interviews with external resources – an instructor could interview a scientist, or someone practicing whatever the subject is, and add that recording to the RSS feed for the class – making it available to all students. Something like a Campus iTunes Music Store could do something similar, but everyone would have to go to it and grab the files, rather than have them quasi-pushed out to them.
- Lots of other things I haven’t come up with…
It’s the second point I’m hoping to play around with – documenting some of the thinking and developments by some of the folks in the learning technology field – hopefully I’d be able to do something like an ITConversations for educational technology stuff. If it works, and doesn’t completely suck, I’d use that as an example for faculty who are interested in the concept. If it doesn’t work, or completely sucks, well – that’s a valid data point as well… The shared lecture audio is a no brainer, in my mind…
The various bits that make up podcasting have been around forever (digital audio, internet distribution, RSS syndication), but the combination of the three makes for a system that approximates a personalized radio station. Imagine each institution having its own podcast directory, and students (as well as faculty) could select which ones they wanted automatically downloaded for review, in their own “university radio station” aggregation…
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3 Responses to “Podcasting for Education”
Well I thought I was the first to think of this but we are on the same page! I am an instructional designer at a growing online college…I am glad there are others out there who think podcasting can help, if not blow the doors off, of e-learning…
Oh nice, now the rich can hear the lecture they missed but our poor students can’t. Not everyone can afford or should be forced to buy an iPod.
I hear you Tim, but keep in mind that despite the name, a portable listening device is not necessary to partake in podcasts. In fact, a recent report that I can’t put my finger on right now found that the majority of podcast listeners actually listen at their computer, instead of on an iPod or other mp3 player. So yes, we still have to get the students to a computer, but your library should be able to help with that part.