Podcasting 101

Your professor is in your player?!!

By Juliann Whitney

It was 2005’s word of the year in the New Oxford American Dictionary, but "podcast" is still a foreign concept to many. With the latest digital craze catching on, the University of Windsor has embarked on a "podcasting" trial - digitally recorded lectures available on line.

"I love the concept, hate the name."
Jonathan Sterne
Department of Art History
& Communication Studies,
McGill University

While just over a year old, some forecast podcasting as revolutionizing teaching, while others are reluctant to endorse it, wondering if it has a place in education at all.

Despite its controversial name, podcasting is a growing phenomena, and fast becoming a buzzword in the popular culture and education. For those who are not familiar with the concept, podcasting is about creating content (audio or video) for an audience that wants to listen when they want, where they want, and how they want.

Once a podcast is created, it is easily made accessible on the Internet for downloads to digital audio players. The podcast’s unique strength is that it can be set up as a subscription feed of automatically delivered new content ( known as RSS or Really Simple Syndication): this is what distinguishes a podcast from a simple download or real-time streaming.

...podcasting is about creating content (audio or video) for an audience that wants to listen when they want, where they want, and how they want.

Since podcasting allows anyone with a microphone and an Internet connection to create audio files, and is much less complicated than it may sound, it stands to reason that this phenomenon has the potential to be revolutionary. In some estimations the concept of podcasting is a grassroots movement to reclaim broadcasting from the hooks of big business and media. At the first academic Podcasting Symposium held last September at Duke University in North Carolina, Jonathan Sterne of McGill suggested that academia should band together early on in the game and change the name to ‘Guerilla Media’, or ‘blogcasting’- anything to remove the product placement association with Apple.

Visit the University of Windsor Podcast Directory to see publicly accessible examples of podcasted lectures.

Despite its label, higher education has caught on to this new technology that gives flexibility and accessibility to students and professors.  The University of Windsor is one of a handful of Canadian universities that has professors piloting lectures as podcasts (or ‘Coursecasts’ for the sensitive). Students can download files from one class at a time, or they can subscribe to the class lectures and have those lectures transferred to their players whenever they hook the devices to their computers. And students are not the only ones downloading lectures. Professors are using the technology as well.

So what does it look like when podcasting meets academia? What are the benefits in real life situations? The following are scenarios that are becoming the norm for students and professors alike.

Podcasting 101

ESL tool

On a chilly winter night, Zhihe Wing, an international student from Hong Kong is busy doing his laundry at the local laundromat. Earphone cords dangle from his ears and disappear into an MP3 player in the pocket of his hoodie.  Most would assume he is listening to music but rather, Zhihe is listening to a lecture that he attended earlier that day, digitally recorded by his professor and then posted on his class site. For Zhihe, the benefits of having lectures available as podcasts are immense.  Zhihe is an exceptional student but finds the language barrier a tremendous challenge. He has been in the habit of recording lectures himself, but now that his lectures are available as podcasts, it means he no longer has to rush to class to ensure he finds a seat directly in front of the podium and go through the embarrassing ritual of popping up and down to put the microphone on the podium. Instead, Zhihe simply plugs his MP3 player into his computer after the class and a few clicks later he has the entire lecture in his pocket to review at his convenience, wherever he may be, including the laundromat.  Podcasting has made it convenient for Zhihe to ensure he understands the material in each lecture.

SOS response

It is 8:30 pm and a weary Dr. Morton is just beginning to deal with the collection of e-mails from her students that have filled her inbox. One e-mail is from a student who has been in a car accident. She has severely sprained her ankle and her doctor has advised that she miss classes for a few weeks to heal.  In the past, Dr. Morton has had little to offer students who have legitimate needs. But now, she is able to remind students who are forced to miss a class that they can access the lectures as a podcast if need be.  Initially, Dr. Morton was reluctant to try podcasting given she didn’t want to give students incentive to miss class and she was not enthusiastic about having her lectures out in the open. However, when she realized that her classes could be locked behind a firewall and accessible to her students only, she felt the process was worthwhile for her as well as her students.

Extra Absorption

After three years of University, Devon Soper is finding that he is more interested than ever in his classes. Yet, he was frustrated spending most of his time during classes scratching out notes that he typically found difficult to read later but felt it was the only way to ensure he didn’t miss anything for exam purposes. Devon’s parents bought him an MP3 player for Christmas and he now listens intently during the class and later, reviews the lectures as podcasts. He types his notes so they are legible and is able to stop and start the audio feed with ease.  He finds that he is able to absorb much more material, enjoys the classes more and is more confident at exam time.  His professor also finds coursecasting worthwhile as it provides students the opportunity to pick up any pieces of the lecture that they may have missed as well as having an extra opportunity to absorb the information after the class.

Home Improvement

Dr. Nimane is a young, enthusiastic professor who loves her new position teaching in the Psychology department. Several of her own professors have influenced her teaching style, but she knows there is room to improve, especially after reading some of the students’ comments. To help with that process, at the end of the term when she has time to think about adjusting her courses for the next offering, Dr. Nimane downloads her lectures on her MP3 player, takes her dog to her favourite path and makes mental notes along the way.  She finds that it easily helps her critique her teaching with an opportunity to adjust.

Peace of Mind

It is 8:30 a.m. and Parker Laing is supposed to be in class. Instead, Parker, a responsible, committed law student who rarely misses class is sleeping soundly. He was up until 3 a.m. finishing an important paper, but he went to bed confident, knowing that he would be able to download his early morning lecture later the next day. While some skeptics of podcasting fear that the Parkers of the world will use podcasting as a crutch, Parker is simply grateful for the option to access his lectures on line when his schedule is gruelling.  Later that morning, Parker downloads the lecture from his computer, dons his MP3 player and heads to the gym, pleased that his professor offers this option for the few occasions he may need to make use of it.

Creative Commons

Dr. Benedikt is a celebrated academic who has written extensively in his field. His classes are packed to the rafters and he typically receives dozens of invitations to give papers but rarely finds time to accept. Dr. Benedikt is a supporter of Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/), a group that supports having academic material widely available online. He was eager to record his lectures as podcasts and makes them available on his university site as well as on iTunes. Among his subscribers are his 85 and 93-year-old parents, colleagues across the world and his dentist. Once the current Canadian copyright legislation is amended to allow for Dr. Benedikt to use his colleagues’ material beyond the confines of the classroom, he plans to take advantage of others’ podcasts in his own classes. He will no longer have to worry about packing CDs or DVDs - he will simply use his laptop in class to click and play portions of selected podcasts from scholars around the world. Meanwhile, other professors will be using his podcasted lectures in their classes. His students find that podcasts enliven classroom interaction and expand upon the material typically confined to a classroom.

Extreme Cramming 

Courtney MacAulay is an Environmental Engineering student at Carleton. Each week Courtney accesses iTunes to download her professor’s video podcast. These complete video tapings of lectures by Dr. Robert Burk are also available as Vodcasts –video streams on-line that do not require a download for students who don’t have access to an MP3 player or don’t want to consume valuable digital memory on a lecture. Last week Courtney was studying for midterms and even though she had understood all the concepts while in class, she found that when she began to write one of the old tests as practice she was missing something. Courtney simply flipped on the lecture about intermolecular forces, watched the 10 minutes of material that she was looking for, and was set.  Courtney believes that there is no way a student can be 100% present through a whole lecture and that it is just natural to drift in and out - podcasts or video podcasts allow a way to get back these bits she may have missed. Courtney’s professor, Dr. Robert Burk, asks his students each term how they make use of technology to learn. Last year, it turned out that the average student was coming to 100% of the live lectures, and reviewing 20% of them using TV or VOD. These extra features, according to Dr. Burk are being used in addition to, not in place of, the live lectures. Dr. Burk believes that it is vital for students to attend live lectures but finds that podcasts and vodcasts enhance live lectures rather than replace them. Courtney agrees and believes that podcasts won’t threaten class attendance, but instead are a great tool for studying and a great way to enhance learning. Courtney hopes that more professors begin using the technology and that the University doesn’t begin charging for the tool.

The Other Side!!

While these scenarios all seem extremely positive, there are aspects to podcasting that elicit very reasonable concerns.  Because the concept is so new, many academics are asking valid questions and hoping to shape the podcasting craze, especially in relation to education. Podcasting in general draws concerns throughout many disciplines, as do the implications of making lectures available via this new technology. We would be naïve to not take the concerns seriously.

To directly address the University of Windsor’s ongoing podcasting pilot project most effectively, we asked a few professors to express their concerns and questions regarding the podcasting of lectures.  We then took their concerns (not their names) directly to Dr. Ron Richard who is in heading up the podcasting pilot at the U of W’s Centre for Flexible Learning.

Concerned Professor:

“Quite frankly, I have enough on my plate as it is. I do not think we should give students reasons or opportunities to miss class, and I am not interested in having to deal with issues that may arise if my lecture material is misunderstood or abused. I also am a believer that students are learning valuable life skills by coming to class and determining the most important aspects of the lecture by taking notes.”

CFL responds:

All professors have every right to teach their courses as they see fit. The right of academic freedom dictates this. This professor, and many other instructors, may have perfectly legitimate reasons not to have their classes recorded, and we respect that. We in no way are forcing this technology onto any member of faculty who does not want to use it, any more than we are forcing professors to use PowerPoint presentations. The choice is always entirely theirs.

Conversely, there are many professors who feel making this option available to their students provides a higher degree of accessibility to the very information they want their students to have, so increasing the potential for absorbing and retaining said information. Students can make notes from a recorded lecture just as easily (perhaps even more easily) as they can a live one, so those benefits remain the same. A goal of any instructor, it seems to me, ought to be to maximize how much and how well the student picks up what the instructor says in the lecture. Podcasting also gives students a greater degree of personal responsibility and accountability for their own learning, which are life skills just as important as those identified by this professor.  It is for those professors that this tool is being made available.

Concerned Professor:

“I have concerns about the safeguarding of my lectures if they are available on the web.”

CFL responds:

Our model tries to provide instructors whose intellectual property is being recorded and made available for student consumption, all the safeguards available. We make the choice and statement of copyright permissions explicit in each and every folder that is created by the instructor to contain their work. We make that copyright permission highly visible right next to the list of available lectures, and advise every instructor to get their students to read and abide by those permissions. We provide three levels of access security to those files:

1. open only to students of a particular course

2. open only to the University of Windsor community

3. open to everyone on the Internet

All that said, it is impossible to completely safeguard any file on the Internet. We exercise due diligence in informing the user and providing certain controls over access, but the reality is that there is little the University can do to prevent students from illegally misusing or redistributing these files, even if they can find some reason for doing so. Again, the exact same thing can be said of every other kind of file, be it a text document, a presentation or any other digital file that is made available to students on-line. This is not a problem specific to sound files.

Concerned Professor:

 “I don’t want to be a wet blanket this early in the game, or maybe I do, but we must not lose sight of the fact that podcasting isn’t free and doesn’t take place in some utopian space void of political, economic and social constraints. MP3 players cost money, as does internet access, software and hardware involved in the production and consumption of podcasts. If there is a digital divide, podcasting takes place right in its heart. Without wanting to overplay the point or sensationalizing it, there is a documented case in which one man was murdered during the theft of his iPod.”

CFL responds:

These comments suggest an unfortunate misinterpretation of the term "podcasting" that is all too common. Indeed, the association with Apple's line of expensive iPod portable audio players is unintentional, the result of having to adopt "podcast" as a term that is most generally associated with the practice of making recorded material available to subscribers via an RSS feed. To this end, I think we might begin to use a brand-free alternative that is coming into use: "coursecasting".

That said, the implementation of "podcasting" as envisioned by the CFL (and still open to discussion regarding its structure and role at the University of Windsor) never intended that students be required or pressured into purchasing iPods, or any other far less expensive MP3 players that would do just as good a job. The core of the initiative is to have instructors record their lectures and make them available for listening to or downloadable to a desktop computer (be it at home, in a computer lab on campus, or in the Leddy Library), exactly the same way as we make other course-related documents, such as lecture notes, PowerPoint presentations and course outlines, available to students on-line via course web sites. That these particular MP3 files, once downloaded, can be transferred to an MP3 player for playback whenever the student wants is a great, additional feature, but not a necessary one. That we can further tie these files to an RSS feed that allows those students with any number of common software applications (such as most current e-mail programs), to have new files automatically downloaded to their home computer, is seen as yet another additional feature (and the only one, I might add, that makes this, officially "podcasting").

If we were proposing that all students who wish to succeed needed to purchase an iPod, then this professor’s socio/political concerns would be valid. But the fact is no student is compelled to do anything of the sort, and for those who feel they have enough complications in their lives and don't want to figure out how to do the "podcast" thing, there is always the very real option of attending the lectures and taking notes.

Concerned Professor:

"It concerns me that the podcasting of lectures will lead to unmanageable class sizes, multiple choice exams and the decline of interactive classrooms."

CFL responds:

We will fight tooth and nail to reject the notion that providing digital resources, in some cases electronic reproductions of in-class materials such as lectures via podcasts, results in a reduction in the workload of instructors who use them, which might then be used as a justification by administration to increase class size. The same argument holds true for instructors of distance ed courses, who have to deal with the false impression that it takes less work to teach these classes as it does to teach the equivalent course face-to-face.

Increased class sizes (and the resultant problem you identify) is an issue between faculty and administration. I have not seen or read any evidence to connect this to podcasting.

It takes the same amount of work to prepare and deliver a lecture whether it is recorded or not. If anything, some professors might object to the extra effort it requires to create folders on the directory server, and upload the sound file, once recorded, to them after each class. We have tried to make this as simple and painless a process as possible, and are confident that once they have done it a few times that this will take no more than a few minutes, and simply become part of the routine for preparing their classes.

With regard to the decline of the interactive classroom, I would add that this is a very real consequence of increased class size, and a far more compelling explanation for absenteeism than has been made against podcasting. If, because of increased class size, instructors are compelled to reduce or remove those elements of their teaching that were more interactive, engaging and interesting, and have reduced these classes to what many students perceive as simply delivering information in a lecture, then they can hardly blame podcasting for that.  And if some classes have been reduced to (or have simply always been) the simple delivery of information via an oral lecture, then it isn't reasonable to blame podcasting for absenteeism if students feel they can get that same information (delivered as many times as they wish to listen to it) without missing out on anything by skipping class. Finding ways of making necessarily large classes more compelling, more interesting, more engaging -- these are ways we need to explore of solving the real problem of absenteeism, and so contribute to a stronger, learning-centered experience.

To conclude, the University of Windsor’s podcasting/coursecasting pilot now underway will no doubt elicit further insights and information, and we will keep you posted as it continues.

Juliann Whitney is a student in Communication Studies at the University of Windsor.

© 2006, Juliann Whitney. All rights reserved.