Tuesday, June 05, 2007

#44 Educational podcasting - launching the Closer! project

The Closer! pilot is a new educational podcasting initiative being run at Sheffield Hallam. It will run in the 2007-08 academic year and will evaluate the Podcast LX Building Block in Blackboard. The pilot will be supported by Academic Innovation in the Learning and Teaching Institute and e-Learning support teams in the faculties. Podcasting, audio and video are relatively new media and Academic Innovation are particularly interested in working with people who are interested in taking the opportunity to introduce innovation into their own practice. The pilot seeks to encourage ideas that introduce either new voices or new ways of sharing voices in the learning environment.
The pilot is called Closer! because one important area for innovation is how the learning community can be brought closer together through the use of audio.
Here are the 10 points I propose in the recording that will help podcast designers create a good educational experience with podcasting:
1. Relevance is clear to the students
2. Recording quality is adequate and represents the significance of the podcast to the course
3. Embedded amongst, and integrated with, other course material appropriately
4. It informs or leads to other learning activity
5. Engaging format appropriate to the audio medium
6. It does not create a burden on the students (time, access, technology)
7. It does not create a burden on the academic (production time, technology)
8. Academically rigorous (ethically and legally appropriate, participants consent, basis of claims to knowledge are clear)
9. It does not exclude some students
10. It connects to related information through its 'show notes' .
An introduction to the Closer! pilot can be found at: http://teaching.shu.ac.uk/podcast/pilot/intro.mp3


Contact: email lta-podcast "AT" shu.ac.uk

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Mark Reed said...

Dear Andrew,

I've been listenning to your podcast with great interest, particularly those relating to podcasting practice, as I've been learning from my own experience with this over the last year or so, and this is the first time I've heard anyone else's experience. You obviously have a huge amount of experience with this medium and have thought a lot about it. I love some of your ideas, especially those for getting students involved in podcasting themselves.

I did a podcast for one of my modules last year and it was a flop. But I got student feedback and made big changes for this semester. The result was a 70% uptake (of 180 students) and overwhelmingly positive feedback. I've taken a mixed model approach, where I supplement lectures with documentaries, vox-pops, interviews and videos. Interestingly, the students really like having the lectures in the podcast, primarily for revision purposes. Even more interestingly, students explicitly say that the podcast actually helps them learn more effectively. For full feedback and more information about my experiences, see:
http://elgg.leeds.ac.uk/lecmsr/weblog/5345.html

3:39 AM

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