by J. Trout Lowen

After reading a newspaper article about Minneapolis elementary-school students who were podcasting, assistant professor David Arendale had an epiphany of sorts. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I’d better catch up! If third-graders are podcasting, what should I be doing with my first-year students?’”

When he looked around campus and saw how many students were wearing iPods and other MP3 music players, he began to form his answer.

Last fall, Arendale started using podcasting (Web-delivered audio broadcasts) and class wikis (collaboratively created Web pages) in his introductory world history course in the Department of Postsecondary Teaching and Learning.

Postsecondary teaching and learning assistant
professor David Arendale, who also uses blogs in his
history class, says podcasting can be a learning tool
for students who have a more auditory learning style.

With help from tech-savvy teaching assistants and his students, Arendale created the weekly podcast, “Then and Now,” to augment his lectures. Each audio show, which students could listen to online or download to an MP3 player, featured a segment in which Arendale discussed study suggestions and potential essay questions, contributions from students, a segment created by a teaching assistant who presented study strategies, and another section on new technologies and how to use them. The students in the class also recorded contemporary music segments for the show, as well as stand-alone music shows that represented a particular country the class was studying.

“I want to be able to reach students using a variety of ways and mediums, and some students experience things better though auditory versus visual,” Arendale explains. “The other reason why I was interested in podcasting is that it allows students to listen to the material when and where they want to . . . they can actually choose to repeat the material in case some of it was unclear.”

For just such reasons, podcasting, vodcasting (online video broadcasting), wikis, and blogs are being used as part of Universal Instructional Design (UID), an educational approach aimed at meeting a wide variety of student learning styles and needs. Originally focused on improving access to postsecondary education for students with disabilities, UID has evolved from adaptations such as video closed captioning and ZoomText screen magnifiers.

“When I was introduced to Universal Instructional Design, I started thinking, ‘Well, this is really great for students with disabilities.’ But the truth of it is that, as I practiced it, it really made a difference for all students,” says Heidi Barajas, a postsecondary teaching and learning faculty member and associate dean for outreach and community engagement.

Some UID accommodations are low tech. Barajas offers one example where she moved a group of students working collaboratively into a separate room to make it easier for a student with a hearing disability. Soon other students, including some second-language learners, were asking for separate rooms for their groups because they were also having difficulty hearing and concentrating.

The virtue of new technologies such as podcasting, she says, is that they allow for repeated listening and for individualized solutions. “Technology really offers a way for people to interact multiple times with information . . . in multiple ways.”

Podcasts and other Web-based technologies can also benefit people with disabilities, provided they can access them, says Pat Salmi, research associate at the Institute on Community Integration, who is working on the Web site study, “Self-Advocacy Online: Research and Development to Bridge the ‘Digital Divide.’”

Many people with intellectual and cognitive disabilities face multiple barriers to accessing Web technology, including basic access to computers, she explains. “[Computers are] a great way to get information to a larger group of users, provided they can get at the technologies, and they can access the technologies—not only have the machines but understand the directions, how to get at the podcast.” A basic understanding of the process can be a challenge, Salmi notes, for many types of users, not just those with disabilities.

Students James Howarth (left) and Mark Sherman Acesor record a podcast
with Anna Resele, a staff member in the Upward Bound program. About one-
third of assistant professor David Arendale’s history students created and
recorded podcasts, an important element of student buy-in.

Second language learners

The podcasts associate professor Murray Jensen records as part of his postsecondary teaching and learning Human Anatomy and Physiology course have been particularly popular with students in the Commanding English program, a two-semester sequence for freshmen for whom English is not the first language. Students can listen to the recorded lectures repeatedly to decode the language, or even stop the podcast so they can look up words in a dictionary. The students’ language skills improve as their understanding of the content grows.

“It takes a number of years to learn just conversational English language,” Jensen explains. “Then you get into anatomy and physiology class, and it’s an academic use of the English language, and that’s another level up,”

Podcasting isn’t Jensen’s first foray into UID or technology-enhanced learning. Several years ago, Jensen created WebAnatomy, an award-winning online tool to help his first-year anatomy and physiology students learn basic terminology and concepts. Students can quiz themselves repeatedly on their knowledge of different anatomical systems and terms and test their knowledge against other students in timed, “Jeopardy”-style games.

Despite the hype, podcasting isn’t really new, Jensen points out. It’s just an updated version of what students with tape recorders have been doing for decades. However, the convenience of podcasts, which students can listen to on the bus or while standing in line at the cafeteria, offers some students a more effective way to study, he says.

Some faculty members have worried that podcasting lectures will result in empty classroom seats. Jensen doesn’t share that concern. “If the goal of your class is to have students in the classroom, don’t use podcasting,” he says. “But if your goal is to help students use the material, then [podcast].”

Techno bumps

While interest in podcasting and vodcasting is growing, a number of barriers still have to fall before use of the technology becomes widespread. Professors need to become more familiar with the technology, and the technology needs to become easier to use, says Victoria Neau, project support coordinator for Academic Technology Services, who helps Jensen upload his podcasts to the Internet.

Recording the lectures isn’t complicated, but it can be cumbersome. “For me, it’s one of 30 things when I’m getting the class going, and I can’t say it’s a priority,” Jensen says. “If I didn’t have someone to upload the stuff, then I wouldn’t do it at all. It’s got to be simple.”

The ideal would be a University-wide system that would allow the instructor to simply press one button to record, then another to turn off the recording, compress it, and post it online, he adds.

Arendale says each of his weekly podcasts requires about five hours of preparation. But he encourages other faculty to enlist students to collaborate on content development and creation. As part of their coursework, his history students could choose to take part in the podcasts or to create wikis with chapter summaries and study guides for major exams. About one-third of the students chose to participate in the podcasts by creating and recording two-minute chapter summaries in their own words or by programming musical segments.

The benefits in terms of student buy-in are worth it, Arendale says. “We want to make sure that students perceive that this is something that they’re creating and that they have input.”

Instructors also have to be mindful of the limitations of students’ technical expertise and access. While nearly all students have basic computer skills, they are not all equally adept at using individual programs. And despite their seeming ubiquitousness, not all students have portable MP3 players or even high-speed Internet access.

“We would never have sent a kid into the library and pointed at the card catalog and said, ‘Go do this,’ and not told them how to find the book,” Barajas notes. “And that’s sort of what we’re doing with technology now because we just assume a lot.”

Technology can’t replace good teaching, Barajas adds. “I hope we would understand teaching and learning well enough to understand that the best teaching and learning happens amongst a diverse group of human beings exchanging ideas.”

For more information about educational podcasting, visit David Arendale’s site podcasting.arendale.org.

PHOTO of students recording a podcast: Dawn Villella