Your students want audio recordings of course lectures as reference material, to review concepts and prepare for exams. Read my recipe for a quick ’n easy Course Lecture podcast.
Ingredients
1 Professor
1 Learning management system (LMS)
1 Release form
Presentation slides
1 Audio recorder
1 Audio editor
Directions
Find a professor who is willing to record course lectures. Add a dash of audio recording equipment with some editing software and your course podcast will be ready to serve.
For ease of making, the course should be delivered using a learning management system, such as BlackBoard, Moodle or Sakai. These systems will have a podcasting module/plugin to automatically update the RSS feed. If not, you can deliver the podcast the usual way, through a web page or a blog.
Your professor will need to sign a release form and inform the class that the lecture is being recorded.
You and your professor need to decide who will do the editing and posting of the audio file. I’m going to assume the professor will do the recording and you are editing and posting the file.
I’m also assuming your professor uses presentation slides (PDF, PowerPoint, Keynote, web pages) and adds the slides to the LMS. If not, you’ll have to figure out a workflow to get the slides onto the podcasting web pages.
Give your professor the audio recorder and some instructions on how to use it. After each lecture the professor gives the recorder back to you so you can download the file. Return the recorder once you’re done.
If the title for the lecture is not readily apparent from the slides, ask the professor for the title. Undescriptive titles such as “Lecture 1,” “Lecture2,” “Lecture 3” are about as useful as a silent alarm clock.
Mix your recording in your audio editing software.
If you simply record a lecture without indexing to indicate when each topic is covered, you are missing a key ingredient. Students will not fast forward through an hour long lecture to find the topic they need. You have to add value by letting them skip to topics within a lecture.
“If you have the resources, index the podcast by creating chapters that correspond to each new topic in the lecture. You can mark each chapter to say which presentation slides are included in the chapter. If you don’t have the resources to index, at least provide show notes that indicate at what time in the recording each topic presented,” says Raj Boora, Senior Instructional Designer for Faculty of Science at the University of Alberta.
Get the podcast online within 2 business days.
Once you have a week’s worth of lectures online, it’s time to pull out the audio editing software again.
“Work with your professor to create a 30-minute weekly summary for the week. These summaries of the lecture content will be absolutely invaluable for your students. They will be your most popular podcasts. When exam time comes around, create a best-of podcast to highlight important topics for review,” says Boora.
Enjoy!
Details, Details
In my department we have a support team to help instructors with technical requirements. Our faculty also provides support on technical and instructional needs.
Our support team initiates a course podcast by making a request to the professor of a particular course. We’ve focused on the introductory-level courses.
We’ve had a few instructors feel that the lecture must be video recorded to really capture the lecture. We’ve had to convince them that podcast is not meant to duplicate a lecture, rather it is meant to enhance a lecture. We’ve resisted using video since video recording is not really necessary, much more complicated and, for the most part, boring.
The recording of weekly summaries and review podcasts is a new initiative for my department. I predict they will be very helpful to students when exam times rolls around.
The Tools We Use
To record, we use an iPod Classic with a Belkin TuneTalk omnidirectional microphone. The professor leaves the iPod on a table. The microphone is good enough to pick up sound if the professor wanders around a bit.
However, the microphone picks up the whine of the iPod’s hard drive. I’d suggest getting a microphone that sits away from the iPod. We don’t use a wireless clip-on microphone because it’s more effort to get the professor set up.
We use Audacity or Garageband to edit and save the file as MP3.
Our LMS is Moodle. Moodle doesn’t ship with a podcasting tool but you can either install the iPodcast module or use the discussion forums tool. These tools will create the RSS feed for you.
Unfortunately we’ve had some trouble with backing up using the iPodcast module and we haven’t found the reason why yet.
You’d like the world to learn about, and listen to, the brilliant speakers who present to your university/college/faculty/department/unit. Read my recipe for a quick ’n easy Speaker Series podcast.
Congrats to the two sites selected as Noteworthy for July 2008 and Happy Canada Day!
