Podcasting and Education: Can schools use podcasting to teach us anything? By Monte Silver, Bamboo MediaCasting

Sharing audio and video files on the Web has been possible for most of the last decade. Why, then, in the past two years has podcasting exploded onto the scene and become such a hot topic
in educational technology? Can technology, and the widespread adoption of mass market media devices, improve education and learning outcomes Or is it merely a passing trend? The Next Big Thing?

This article explores the subject of podcasting in education. It is based on Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU) recently published concise, yet comprehensive and objective analysis on the subject, as well as interviews I have conducted with especially educators involved in such projects.

The CMU analysis examines three areas: (1) the creation and distribution of lectures for review, (2) the delivery of supplemental educational materials and content, and (3) assignments
requiring students to produce and submit their own podcasts.

The most obvious user scenario for podcasting is making new and archived lectures available for students to listen to out of class. Clearly, lectures can be delivered using several web and other techniques. Podcasting is one more tool in the educator's arsenal. Thus podcasting lectures must provide additional value beyond existing methods.

As to the unique traits of podcasting over other tools, the CMU report finds that students found obtaining files via RSS as helpful, a fact that increases the likelihood that they download a lecture.

However, there is strong resistance among educators to making lectures available on-line. In the report, as well as among educators I interviewed, there is concern that making lectures available on-line may negatively impact the valuable "in the classroom" experience and interaction.

However, the report finds that most students perceive lecture podcasts as a tool for review, rather than as a replacement for attending lectures. A small percentage of students indicated that the availability of recorded lectures might make them more likely to miss class, but none of the studies report a significant impact on overall attendance.

One especially interesting and consistent finding was that a majority of students report using lecture podcasts at home or on a computer, rather than in a mobile environment with a portable device. Clearly, this finding flies in the face of the RSS concept, and podcasting being necessarily a "mobile thing".

In summary, the report and my interviews seems to emphasize the many problems raised associated with the undermining of the "in-class" experience. If there is a compelling value to educational podcasting, it must be found elsewhere.

These areas will be explored in Part 2 of this series

Get the CMU white paper here.