IMPALA Informal Mobile Podcasting and Learning Adaptation

GeoPods - A Podcast Library for Geographical Techniques

Department of Geography, University of Leicester

Summary
The podcast library was created by two colleagues at Department of Geography, University of Leicester. The library is consisted of a series of audio-visual clips demonstrating and explaining how to use a variety of field equipment and techniques. It is principally designed to support student independent learning in the field. This case study will introduce audience to the rationale of the development, a description of the application, technology involved and more interestingly, recommendations and guidelines on good practice and future development of the library.

Rationale
Fieldwork is a crucial component of teaching and learning in Geography. It often involves using equipment and techniques. In the field trip, students work in independent groups and they are often challenged by using equipment or techniques that they have not used before. Student on-site support is crucial! However, traditionally and historically, on-site support has been insufficient for several reasons. One of the challenges is the limited resources in terms of staff availability and manuals. Only a limited number of staff (one or two) will accompany students to the field site. Sometimes staff members have to travel a couple of kilometres in a day to provide the support to different groups of students located at different places. There are limited copies of manuals as well, and they are too heavy to carry when travelling. Only the staff members will have the access to these manuals. Another challenge is, students are not trained or prepared enough before they go out to the field trip. There are some lectures that cover some of the techniques, but not all students will take the course. On the whole, students are not trained formally and systematically, so they have to learn on the site. Staff members are not trained to use every technique either.

Actions have been taken by colleagues at Department of Geography to better support students working in the field. One of the changes is, students are now formally and systematically taught and demonstrated with a series of equipment and techniques in a second year module called Techniques in Environmental Analysis before they go out to the field trip. A podcast library of geographical techniques was developed to complement to the technique module. Students will be shown the techniques that have not been covered in the technique module in the podcasts.

Students are expected to use the podcast library in several ways. First, the library is made available through the university's Blackboard VLE, and all the students studying at Department of Geography are given the access to the library. Students have the opportunity to have a look of the equipment library and get some pre-training, and get some ideas what they might be doing in the field. They are encouraged and highly recommended to watch the podcasts and prepared themselves before they go out to the field trip.

The podcast library is also pre-loaded onto different mobile devices including laptops, Tablet PCs, and iPods so that students can take them out to the field and use these instructional podcasts as a review or reminder of the techniques. In this way, students will be working independently in the field instead of heavily relying on the staff member to show them how to do things. It will also help to save time for both the students and staff members, so that the teacher can spend more time with the students on the more challenging tasks, and students can spend more time on reading and data collection and focusing on how to improve the quality of the work they are going to produce.

Application
A discussion with academic and technical staff at the Geography Department was conducted before the development of library in order to generate a list of topics that need to be covered in the podcasts. Thirty-five podcasts in five categories were created and included in the library. Each podcast is about 7-10 minutes in duration. An outline of categories or topics covered in the library was shown below:

• Surveys and surveying techniques
• Sampling strategies
• Field techniques: Soil, Water, Atmosphere
• Mobile technology
• Data loggers

The podcast library covers very generic techniques that students from all levels: undergraduate, postgraduate, and dissertation students can benefit. They are also generic across a range of disciplines such as Geography, Geology and Archaeology, in which the field work is an essential component.

Technology
The podcast files are made downloaded in a variety of formats: WMV, AVI and MP4.

The development involves of using a range of software applications:

• Audacity: Audio narrations are recorded in Audacity.
• PowerPoint: Photos are imported in PowerPoint to prepare for slides
• SnagIt: is used to capture actions in PowerPoint
• Adobe Premium Pro: is used as the video editing software that puts audio, images and videos together.
• Videoauro: is used to convert WMV into MP4.

A diagram (Jarvis and Dickie, 2007) of the technology and method used was shown below:

Recommendations

Scripts are very important
Prepare scripts for all podcasts before creating them is crucial. They are especially useful if you want to re-use them for other purposes in somewhere else.

Breaking down
Breaking down big audio files into small clips is practical advice as dealing with a small session is much easier than with a big speech where you are likely to make mistakes. It is also good for reusable purposes. For example, "At Leicester", is treated as a separate audio file, if other people from another institution wants to use the library, they can simply replace it by "At xxxx".

Batch work
When developing a library of this size, the most productive way is to do everything in batches. For example, preparing the scripts for all the podcasts, recording them all in Audacity, taking all the photos, filming all the equipments and procedures, and finally, putting every thing together in Adobe.

Separate video from audio
Another practical advice is to record videos and audios separately, and label them as: audio0, audio1, audio2, video0, video1, video2.so the video and audio footage match.

Future Work
The colleagues at Leicester are planning to experiment the use of the library with a small pilot group of students who studying the technique module and will use the library in their field trip. Once the pilot is done, the next step will be to test the library with other field-based disciplines within the University of Leicester. Another step will be to take the library to other universities.

Another development is to have other institutions contribute to and expand the library. With the numbers of podcasts growing, the podcasts will be getting from generic to more and more specific.