IMPALA Informal Mobile Podcasting and Learning Adaptation
The Use of Podcast to Provide Summaries to Lectures
Earth Sciences and Geography, Kingston University
Summary
This podcast application was developed for a level three module entitled ‘Water Resources Management’, within Earth Sciences and Geography, Kinston University. The purpose of podcast was to provide students with additional information that supplemented to weekly lectures. The podcasts were 5-6-minute audio files delivered via Blackboard VLE on a weekly basis. Each podcast consisted of a variety of elements given by the lecturer: review of key concepts, introduction to next week’s lecture, and further reading.
Context
This podcast application was developed for a level three module Water Resource Management in the School of Earth Sciences and Geography, Kingston University. The module includes a variety of different teaching methods: lectures, seminars, field trips, and student-based presentation. It was assessed through two essays, a fieldwork report, and a debate.
Rationale
The purpose of using podcasts was to provide students with a summary to the weekly lecture with a review of key themes and make connections between lectures. The lecturer wanted to provide students with online resources that were not simply repeating the lecture materials, but served as a supplement to the weekly lectures.
The lecturer chose this third-year module because he has been teaching this module for 12 years. He is quite familiar with the module development over the period and was comfortable to experiment with using podcasts. The combination of familiarity with the material and comprehension of the students learning abilities at this level made the module attractive to conduct these empirical experiments.
Application
The lecturer developed weekly summary podcasts. Each podcast was about 5-6 minutes long and contained a variety of different resources: a review of the key concepts and themes presented in the lecture, a brief introduction to the following weeks’ lecture, and advice on further reading and research. The lecturer would also include student seminar material within these summaries to provide a different ‘voice’ in presenting material. The podcasts were made available from Blackboard VLE.
Technology
A software called Audacity was used for recording and editing the summary podcasts.
Evaluation
The impact of podcasting on students’ learning was being captured through qualitative and quantitative methods. Quantitative data was captured through a beginning-of-semester questionnaire with eighteen students, developed to gather data on students’ technical profiles, and an end-of-semester questionnaire with nineteen students, developed to gather data on students’ pattern of listening to podcasts, such as how many podcasts they listened to, time and place they listen to podcasts, and reasons for not listening. The data were analyzed using Excel employing descriptive methods.
The qualitative data was captured through two focus groups with nine students during the middle of semester and personal interviews with seven students in the end of the semester. Student interviews, lasted about an hour, were conducted using a semi-structured interview schedule developed to explore how student learning is supported by podcasts.
Staff experience of developing podcasts was gathered through a personal interview with the lecturer who developed the podcasts. Information gathered included pedagogical rationale of using podcasts, the development process, and issues encountered.
All interviews with both students and staff were recorded on a digital recorder and transcribed verbatim for analysis to identify key themes and issues. The qualitative data was analyzed using a grounded theory approach offered by Strauss and Corbin (1990).
Benefits
A generalisation of the weekly lecture
Many students reported that the summary podcasts gave them a good generalisation of the weekly lecture. Students can have a summary of the key points to each lecture within a very short time.
“But it is a good generalisation. It’s a good recap rather than if you had a whole page of notes going ‘lecture 1’, you might not know if the information you’re after is in there. So you know a two minute click and play and it will say basically what the general topics were, general examples, things like that. So it’s very useful like that.”
“Yeah, I think the summaries are good I think it’s probably worth summarising things because you could have a few minutes summary and it could help immensely.”
Listening is easier than reading
Listening to podcasts offers a psychological benefit that listening is easier than reading.
“Sometimes if I have a lot of reading to do, I have a Reader on my computer and I copy and paste them on my Reader so I put them on and I listen to them while I am doing my washing up for example. That’s very handy. I find a lot easier to capture material when it is in spoken form rather than when I read. I read because I have to but I am not a very good reader.”
“Because it’s either listening for a few minutes or reading four or five pages of an entire text, and people being lazy nowadays they don’t want to read all the work but they’d rather just listen to it.”
A different way of learning
Some students said listening to podcasts is a new way of learning. It’s a different way of picking up information. They are interested to find out how it works.
“It is a good thing that I have different ways of picking up information. I don’t see that being a problem I can easily fit it in with the rest of the stuff that I do.”
One of the students sent the podcasts to his friends and families in France.
“Yeah, I have listened to some of them. Um, at first it was like, as Bruno said, like a new thing I want to listen to just know if it’s working. I found it quite alright. I also sent some to some of my friends actually, or members of my family just as a kind of promote between …Well, they are not really good in English anyway. They are quite interested because I mean I’d never heard about that in France. It’s not regular I mean not that much anyway. So, it’s kind of a new thing for …”
Lessons Learned
Time investment
Recording summary podcasts is time consuming, both in the preparation of content and the editing (e.g. the files would be needed to save in two primary formats: wmv and mp3 for variable hardware use). The lecturer discovered that on average a 5-minute podcast would take between one and two hours to prepare. For the first few summaries produced, much of the time was taken overcoming technical issues concerned with recording, editing and transcription podcasts to Blackboard. However, the lecturer favoured this DIY approach because, (i) it maintained ownership of the podcast and will make future editing simple (updating where required) and, (ii) it allows him to describe this process to the students with a view to tutoring future cohorts of students to produce their own podcasts in future.
A means to encourage learning in a wider context
Summary podcasts encourage learning of the wider themes and issues surrounding the module material. Particularly at final year level, the lecturer stressed that lectures should not be assumed to be stand-alone entities and that the mode of module assessment would reflect this holistic approach. Summary podcasts that link themes between lectures, literature and the media support this.
Future Work
In the future, the colleague is planning to get students involved in creating lecture summaries as podcasts by making the experience more active.
Experience in 2006/7 was limited to the use of podcasts to support a final year module. The lecturer’s learning experience was empirical and lessons have been learned that provide a springboard for future use. The intention in 2007/8 is to extend the use of podcasts to a larger first year cohort of students in a more strategic manner. Rather than produce podcasts on the fly during and immediately after individual lectures, the lectures and podcasts supporting material will be pre-planned in the summer of 2007 and a deductive evaluation process devised in tandem to assess student experiences. The module chosen at Kingston University is a first year module called ‘Understanding the Environment’, delivered to approximately 120 students.
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