My podcasting experience

This semester I introduced podcasting into one of my undergraduate units in two ways. I delivered the unit content via podcast lectures and I designed the first student assessment to be the creation of a podcast about media education or new media.

I created the podcast lectures using Garageband on my Macintosh Powerbook. This was an extremely simple process. I simply opened a new project in Garageband, and then pressed record and started speaking. There were a few little tricks I learnt along the way to improve the process (like turning off the "metronome" feature to remove that sound from the backgroud). I also learnt that using an external microphone and recording in a very quiet room significantly improved the quality of the sound. I purposely kept the recording to about 30 minutes to avoid file sizes being too big, and because I suspected that my students' attention span wouldn't hold out for much longer than that.

Once I was satisfied with the recording and I wanted to export the file, I simply used Garageband's "Share" function and sent it to iTunes. In iTunes I set the preferences to the MP3 encoder and to quite a low quality to create a compressed file of the podcast that was small enough for the students to comfortably download. This generally ended up being about 8mb. Once the file was created, I uploaded it to the university's Online teaching site. From there the students were free to download it and listen to it at their leisure. I made this part of the students' reading for the week. They were still required to come along to three hours of "lecture and tutorials". However, the time was significantly freed up to allow some much more student centred workshops and production tasks.

For the student assignment, the students learnt how to use Audacity for their sound recording and mixing. I chose this program rather than Garageband as it is a free download for both PC and Macs. I intended that the students would be able to download it at home and complete their mixing on their home machines. For their field interviews, the students used portable digital audio recorders. In most cases this worked well. A few students were unable to successfully download the program, and needed access to machines at the university to complete the task. Furthermore, the digital audio recorders recorded very "tinny" sound which didn't really match the sound of the voice overs recorded directly into audacity via the computer. Next semester I will have Audacity installed in one of the computer labs for students to use at their leisure. I will also investigate the cost of purchasing better quality portable digital audio recorders.

However, the main issue with the podcasts was not so much technical as creative. Although we spent time in class learning about structure, podcast conventions and so on, some of the students did not put enough time into planning the productions or reserching their topics. So this is where we will focus much more attention next time around.

Overall I was very pleased with the success of introducing this new media form into the unit. A number of the students expressed their enjoyment of the assignment task, commenting that it was a pleasant break from writing research papers, and that it made sense to make media in a media education unit.