The rationale for introducing podcasts included enlivening the course, complementing the announcements page (‘what you're doing next week’, and so on), as a mechanism for providing feedback on work, e-tivities and assignments, and for informal knowledge acquisition in a perhaps more entertaining way.
Typically a podcast was divided into three main sections:
- ‘News’
- Announcements and feedback
- Fun ending
The ‘news’ related the course material to current events. It gave the course context and the students a wider background so that they could situate what they were learning to the world they were in. Whilst not being directly assessed through an understanding of this informal knowledge, they could also use their new-found knowledge in situations not discussed directly elsewhere in the course. The intention of this was that they would reflect on their learning, perhaps even discuss it with colleagues and friends, and gain deeper insights into the material. Because this item was reasonably topical, it was not usually possible simply to recycle podcast news from the previous presentation of the course.
This second section, which I considered as announcements and feedback, would comment, in a general way, on the students’ achievements and signpost what they should be doing next. It helped to motivate the students and helped them to pace their work.
The last part of the podcast was the ‘fun part’, and normally consisted of a joke. It was quite difficult to find jokes about optical fibres so they weren't always particularly relevant! On one more famous occasion I did a rap, which seemed to capture the imagination of the press (Tysome 2006). Why did I include a fun part at all? When I was considering this course, I looked at the student feedback from my previous lecture course and found that some students enjoyed the humour in the lecture. Again it kept it alive. (Of course, some students also complained about the quality of the jokes!) But it seemed reasonable that, if I were to put the course online, it should not lose this aspect. So the podcasts finished with some humour. I also tended to include cartoons on the announcements page, hoping that students would be more motivated to log for a smile. The rationale for this was therefore:
- to encourage students to listen to the podcast
- to keep students listening to the end, and
- to humanize the podcast and make it more informal.
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