One of the departments here in the Faculty just recently tried podcasting for the first time in a second year course as a dry run for a more intensive pilot coming in the fall and found that what the students like the most about the podcasts were the value added features – chapter marks, screened and sorted content (editing) really got the students to use the podcasts. This result surprised the instructor to some degree – I think that the more labour intensive productions were received much better than those that had less effort put into them – but to me, this seems natural, it’s GIGO or some similar idea. To some degree, it was also reassuring that students used the podcasts to review content and concepts, not to cover skipped classes.
Other departments have done podcasting as well, but they were straight recordings of the instructor. Both of these production methods have a chance of being accepted by the students, but in the end, the value added podcasts have a major benefit of helping the instructor as well through being forced to review their classroom presentation as they edit together the concepts that they see as most important and reflecting on how or why to include other elements that might be deemed important later. A straight recording offers no chance for the instructor to learn and has a generally high noise to content ratio for the student. So while students are likely to use both, they will get far more out of one than the other.
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