by Wesley Fryer

The October 20th Chicago Sun Times article “Missed class? Try a podcast” again reveals increasingly familiar battle lines on the topic of university professor lecture podcasts. On one side are the students, and some professors, claiming the technology provides more options for students to obtain class content and stay caught up. On the other side are dissenters, composed mainly of professors but also parents and others, who fear podcasting technology because it might keep students from coming to class.

Several article quotations stood out for me:

[Dr.] Carlson downloads her lectures to iTunes as well as the Purdue site. After she was featured on the home page of the iTunes Web site, the number of subscribers to her podcast shot up to 750 from 100. A history major e-mailed to say he enjoyed her lectures, as did an engineer who graduated from college years ago. “When I saw the subscribership shoot up to 750, I started getting nervous. I love an audience, but an audience of 750 that I can’t read or get feedback from is intimidating,” Carlson said.

First a technical but important correction. No one, Dr. Carlson or anyone else, is “downloading lectures to iTunes.” iTunes and other podcasting directories like Odeo do not host podcast files, they just index and link to feeds. iTunes has a link to Dr Carlson’s podcast feed (Physics 415: Thermal and Statistical Physics). When she saves a new podcast to a server at Purdue, and links it from her class podcast blog, iTunes and other podcatcher software programs automatically download the latest podcast for subscribers.

Secondly, it is also not entirely accurate to say that a podcast audience cannot interact with a professor, although the interaction modality certainly can change. There are more tools for out of class interactivity available than ever before. Instant messaging and asynchronous discussion boards, in addition to more traditional email and phone calls, are tools professors are using with success to provide feedback to students. It is great this professor (Erica Carlson) wants to provide feedback and interactivity for students. I know some professors who teach online and minimize interactive exchanges with students whenever they can. That is a crime when those students are paying to take a course from the professor. For students who are not paying, like many of Carlson’s iTunes subscribers, it is an exciting prospect for anyone in academe to have so many people voluntarily choosing to listen and access presentation materials. Isn’t this a big reason we educators are doing what we are doing: to get others to think about our ideas and potentially be changed as a result of an educational learning experience we have together? If podcasting advances that goal (and it both can and does) then educators should embrace it.

This comment in the article by a concerned parent reveals the perceptual fantasy land that many people continue to live in when it comes to traditional, face to face instruction:

“I would be rather upset with that,” said Elizabeth Tenison, who said she isn’t worried about her daughter skipping class. “Part of going to a university is hearing alternate points of view … and that would be lost in large part if students didn’t attend. They would hear it, but they wouldn’t be participating.”

In many, many university classes, especially at the undergraduate level but also the graduate level, students may be there in person, but the are NOT participating! They may be looking at the professor, may even be taking some notes, but when content delivery is predominantly in a one-way lecture format, there is little room for interaction during class. Dr. David Nickles, a computer science professor at the University of Hawaii quoted in the article, is on the right track providing lectures to his classes of 600 students via podcast. If it is possible for students to have a comparable intellectual experience listening to a podcast lecture, then by all means the institution and the professor should provide this learning option.

This article was originally posted on The Speed of Creativity and is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 License.

Photo by Andrew