Podcasting for learning in Higher Education (HE) moved over our horizon early in 2006. We both work at the Beyond Distance Research Alliance at the University of Leicester in the UK. We noticed a strong surge of interest from university teachers from different disciplines in the use of downloadable audio files. And we watched hundreds of students walking around campus, sitting on the buses, or lying on the grass in the park, with MP3 players ‘glued’ to their ears. What previously appeared to be a somewhat ‘techie’ approach to playing music suddenly looked, to us anyway, like something that might have high value and low cost for learning.
Then the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) funded us to carry out a pedagogical podcasting research project, IMPALA (impala.ac.uk), so we got the chance of obtaining some empirical data to find out whether podcasting was ‘worth it’ for students. Around 20 university teachers and 500 students across six topics, subjects and disciplines and different modes of learning were involved.
It was and it is worth it! Staff and students appreciated our efforts. It’s pretty easy to podcast and have an impact on learning. We hope this book will inspire you to try it.
A winding pathway led us to ‘podcast alley’. As with most attempts to exploit new technologies for learning, there are complex histories – and preparing for the future is a little messy and uncertain. More about the future later! Out of the melee and the myriad of possibilities we wanted some well-grounded models and examples from practice to light the way. Critically, though, we were able to draw on some previous journeys.
We benefited from a pilot using podcasts in an undergraduate engineering course. Within a module in Electrical Engineering (Optical Fibre Communication Systems) at the University of Leicester, podcasts provide students with guidance on weekly learning activities and help to motivate them by including news and fun items (Fothergill 2007). Our first write-up from the pilot concluded (Edirisingha et al. 2007: 134):
‘Our pilot study highlighted how ‘profcasting’ contributed to student learning: supporting organizational aspects of learning; developing positive attitudes towards the lecturer, bringing in an informality and fun to formal learning; helping with independent learning; enabling deep engagement with learning material; providing access while being mobile. The study also emphasized that listening to educational material is different from listening for entertainment; therefore, podcasts must be integrated with other learning activities…’
We concluded that students’ MP3 players can have a double life! – one for entertainment and another for learning.
At the time the IMPALA project started, there was, and perhaps still is, concern that students would be unwilling or unable to separate their learning from entertainment, or be reluctant to use their personal devices for university work so we addressed those issues in our research. We are happy to report that they were largely unfounded fears, and in the Web 2.0 climate, some evidence that students prefer to use devices of their own choice (Dennett and Traxler 2007).
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