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Reaching Your Students Via Podcasting

By Nick Laudato, CIDDE Associate Director

Photo by Jim Burke, CIDDE
Illustration by Alec A. Sarkas, CIDDE

Pitt faculty are sharing audio recordings of their lectures and course notes with students via podcasting.

Everywhere you look on campus, you see students wearing ear buds, listening to their iPods or other MPEG players. The players have become as ubiquitous as cell phones, and, in the latest round of technology convergence, many cell phones now can play the same audio and video files.

The term “podcast” is a blended word derived from Apple’s iPod portable music player and the term “broadcast.” At its core, a podcast is an audio or video (also called a “vodcast”) recording, in a compressed digital form, delivered to its subscribers via the Internet. In actuality, it does not require an iPod (or other MPEG player) to receive or play podcasts, but the term has caught on. Podcasts can be played and viewed on any modern computer. The Pew Internet and American Life Project estimated that 12 percent of all Internet users had downloaded podcasts as of November 2006, up from 7 percent in February of 2006. This growth rate is too compelling to ignore.

Faculty have begun using podcasts to capture their lectures and make them available to their students to study or review at their convenience. Podcasts can supplement and reinforce lectures or, for students who missed class due to illness, provide a limited substitute. Some faculty use them to publish a presentation before the class, require students to listen to the podcast, and engage in active discussion during the face-to-face component of the course. Others use them to supplement or further explain difficult concepts.

To create a podcast, an instructor must do three things: (1) record an audio or video program, (2) edit and compress the recording to clean it up and make it easier to download, and (3) publish the recording so students can receive it. CIDDE is supporting faculty in all three of these areas.

Recording Your Podcast
You can record your audio or video in the classroom, in the field, or in a controlled environment such as a studio. Any recording device can serve as the source for your podcast, but tapes and other recording media must ultimately be converted to one of the MPEG formats supported by podcasting for your students to use them. The Faculty Instructional Development Lab (FIDL) at CIDDE has the hardware, software, and technical expertise to assist you in this effort.

For audio recordings in the field or classroom, Instructional Media Services (IMS) can lend you the portable Marantz digital recorder, capable of recording audio directly in mp3 format on your own compact flash card. This device is documented in a Webcast (see ITmCast034 at https://cidde-web.cidde.pitt.edu/mcast). IMS can also lend digital video cameras for those wishing to capture video.

For studio-like recordings, the FIDL has specialized audio and video recording booths that can be used by faculty to make recordings under controlled sound and light conditions.

Editing Your Podcast
Once you have an audio or video recording in hand, you may want to edit and compress it to provide a better experience for your listeners/viewers. In an editing session, you can add an introduction and ending, eliminate errors, pauses, or unwanted segments, balance the sound levels, and clean up pops and hisses. Some faculty add musical introductions or backgrounds.

The open source program “Audacity” is an excellent free tool to edit and convert audio. Audacity is explained in ITmCast025 <https://cidde-web.cidde.pitt.edu/mcast>. The FIDL supports several higher-end audio and video editing packages, and the FIDL staff can help you learn to use them.

The extra time to compress an audio or video is usually well worth the effort. For example, one instructor’s hour-long audio recording was 93 MB in size when recorded directly on his PC. By using the audio compression tools available in the FIDL, the size of the recording was reduced to 7 MB with no audible loss in quality. This size reduction can make a significant difference to listeners, both in download speed and in their required disk storage space.

Publishing Your Podcast
Once your audio or video content is ready for your students, you must publish it. Some of the early adopters at Pitt have simply embedded their files into CourseWeb, but this creates two problems and is thus not an optimal solution. First, a great number of multimedia files may make the size of your Blackboard course too large to accurately back up and restore. Second, embedding your multimedia files in Blackboard requires students to go through multiple complicated steps to load the content onto their portable viewers, potentially deterring their use.

To address these problems, CIDDE developed the “CourseCast” service based on its mCast server technology <https://cidde-web.cidde.pitt.edu/mcast>. The mCasts were introduced in November of 2005 for faculty development and training in the areas of instructional technology, instructional design, and Blackboard support. The mCast Web site was designed to deliver a wide variety of multimedia content (Mediasite recordings, video, audio, and text) in a variety of ways (download, streaming, or subscription). The mCast concept was announced in the March 2006 edition of the Teaching Times and is documented in BbmCast000 <https://cidde-web.cidde.pitt.edu/mcast>.

The CourseCast service is intended to provide an easy-to-use platform for faculty to distribute course-related audio and video content to their students. Once you have a course account, you can browse your local computer for your audio or video files, select the appropriate files, and upload them to the CourseCast server. The CourseCast software will create the RSS code (necessary to make a podcast) behind the scenes. The CourseCast site then makes the content available to your students for either download or subscription, the preferred way to get it to their iPods or other MPEG players. From a student’s perspective, subscribing to your podcast will require only a single click. Faculty can direct students to the CourseCast site or can embed links in their Blackboard course site to the CourseCast media.

CourseCast Control Panel
The CourseCast server software was built to resemble a blog in the way it functions. New content appears on the top of the page, pushing down content posted earlier. Unlike a typical blog, however, you can choose to secure your CourseCast site so only your students and selected colleagues can reach your content. CourseCast can authenticate against the University’s computer user account system. This same authentication system allows students to make comments on a posting (another feature of blogs). Nonauthenticated postings are first sent to the course instructor for approval before being displayed.

To use CourseCast for your course you must simply commit to keeping file sizes to a minimum (there is a limited amount of disk space available), and recognize that the CourseCast server is not a 24/7 production environment. Staff in the FIDL will help you learn how to record, edit, compress, and upload your content to the CourseCast site. The CourseCast service is documented in ITmCast039 <https://cidde-web.cidde.pitt.edu/mcast>. For more information, call Nick Laudato at 412-624-3335 or e-mail laudato@pitt.edu.

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