The second day of the Teaching Professor Conference was the “big day”. Too many sessions, and too little time to visit most of them.
The first session I was able to attend on Saturday was a session on podcasting – presented by Dave Yearwood of the University of North Dakota. The concept is pretty simple. A podcast is basically an audio (and/or video) feed that you can download from somewhere on the ‘net, slap onto your portable music player, and listen to … wherever. So why not use it for educational purposes? Apple, who wants to get an iPod into the hands of every man, woman, child, dog, and cat in the world, will even help out setting it up.
I see some potential in this. With very little effort, instructors could record and distribute lectures for students to use to prepare for tests. (More visual instructors might prefer to distribute digital video.) Of course, we’ve done this sort of thing for years with audio and video tape – but the digital formats are at least a lot less hassle for creator and listener alike.
Yearwood mentioned several things to consider before using podcasts:
- What’s the point of the podcast?
- What should a student get out of it?
- How do you keep students interested?
All of these are valid questions, I think. If the purpose of distributing a recorded lecture is to help students study or to help students who missed a lecture catch up, then I’d not expect to see much gain from putting recorded lectures out there. (I would not be surprised to see a detrimental effect caused by students skipping class!) Should the podcasts cover core course content or be optional material?
Yearwood pointed out a few things about presentation. One was that the simplest ways to record audio (like mikes built into most laptops) result in poor quality audio. It’s difficult to get students to listen to poor quality audio. I agree with that, since I can’t stand listening to bad audio, either.
There’s also the time factor. Even if the audio quality is top notch, how many students would actually download and listen to an entire lecture – or something of comparable length – on their own time? More than 15 minutes or so, and nobody will listen. (Me, I’d say that time should be closer to five minutes, but …) Even fifteen minutes of talking might be too much, so Yearwood suggests spicing the podcast up with incidental music.
Yearwood (too) briefly mentioned some tools that instructors might use to create quality podcasts – audacity got a mention, and it’s freely available. (I have that installed on my laptop – it’s a nice audio recorder/editor.)
Up until the end of Yearwood’s presentation, I was largely undecided on whether or not I thought I could work podcasting into my courses. It seems like a lot of work, and might require some costly tools that I probably couldn’t easily get through my school. Plus, the benefits hadn’t been clearly demonstrated – would providing podcasts be in some way better than – say – having non-audio supplemental material available on a course web site for students?
What, I think, finally steered me away from using my very limited spare time to experiment with podcasting as an educational tool was the last few minutes of the presentation – where we listened to a podcast for students. The audio quality was quite good. There was incidental music, too. But I’ll be darned if I could figure out what that podcast was supposed to teach me. It just wasn’t … engaging. And if I can’t get engaged by podcasts, I doubt that I’ll be able to create podcasts that engage my students.
In my next post,. I’ll talk about a technology demonstrated at the conference that I will use.
Speaking of online learning resources in chemistry, are you aware of what McGill University in Canada has been doing in this regard? They’ve got a number of lower level lecture courses freely available for download (including podcasts of the same). This effort is their “COOL” program – COurses OnLine. Here’s the link: http://cool.mcgill.ca/
My personal favorite is lecture 15 from CHEM-150 in the 2006 Winter session…
Sigma147
PS – as an aside, I am in no way affiliated with McGill or COOL.
Thanks for the pointer. I downloaded a couple of the videos on the “COOL” site. I’m not sure exactly what software they’re using, but the presentations look like what a few colleagues of mine are doing with Powerpoint and Camtasia – creating Powerpoint presentations with voice-overs.
I do wonder how many students use that kind of presentation. The “COOL” stuff that I saw was essentially recorded lectures. They’re high bandwidth (40MB per video … long download time unless you’re downloading them from the same campus over a good connection) and require a lot of time to watch, since they’re full length lectures. Good (A/B) students probably benefit from the materials at the “COOL” site, but I don’t see much there that would engage the kind of student that I need to reach – the ones who can’t sit through a lecture the first time.