With many of us going back to teaching in the next week or so I wanted to post about an application I have been using for the past three years to podcast some of my courses. Coursecasting, as this type of podcasting is called, is a great way to provide lecture material to students for review or for students who miss a class. You can also use this technique to record and share any talk or critique your own presentation skills. There is extensive online information on coursecasting, but in my own experience I have found that overall students like the ability to review course material on their own time. And I have not found that attendance drops when podcasts are made available – although I teach at a small University where attendance usually is not a problem. Your results may differ.
The key to sticking with coursecasting is making it simple. Your techie urges may keep you going for a while, but to continue semester after semester you want it to be easy. Quick setup and no post presentation editing. You may be fortunate to work at a school with IT support for coursecasting, but I don’t. The apps and services I’ll describe below require no help from your IT department.
OK – you’re excited. But what do you need?
- The only thing you will have to buy is an application called Profcast. This is Mac only software at the moment, although the developers promise a Windows version soon (yet another reason to switch). The current cost is $60 ($30 academic pricing). If you are using Windows there are other software solutions. Either way, get your department to pay for it.
- Presentation software – ProfCast supports either PowerPoint or Keynote.
- A microphone that provides audio input to the computer playing your presentation- I use the internal mic on my Mac laptop and the sound is fine. The downside is that when you walk away from the laptop your voice level drops, but the laptop mic does pick up student voices when they comment or ask questions. You can use a wireless lapel mic, but then you cannot record students in the class.
With this simple setup you can record a podcast in any room that has a digital projector. Your studio moves with you. To record your lecture or talk you simply open profcast and drag your presentation into this window:
ProfCast will open your presentation and when you are ready to start you click the record button. The software will record your voice in synch with each slide. When have finished your talk, you click the share button and ProfCast turns the recording into a .m4a or .m4b enhanced podcast file – this means that chapter headings are inserted so that students can easily advance to any slide in your talk and listen to that specific part of the lecture/talk. Your talk will look like this when viewed in iTunes:
- Podcast viewed in iTunes showing chapter selection – click to enlarge
Recording the presentation is that easy! The trickiest part is actually distributing your recordings to students. You can link each one to a webpage or distribute them using classroom support software like Blackboard or Angel. If your University has an iTunes U setup you can use that. I have played with a few solutions but am now using the following:
- Upload your podcast episodes (the individual lectures) to an internet server. This can be on your University servers or using your own personal web host. I started using Bluehost (which also hosts this blog) because I could not access my University servers from off campus. ProfCast makes this process easy by providing a built in podcast publisher. This part of the software will add each new episode to your podcast and then upload them to your server space. ProfCast will also write the RSS file (the most technical part of this process). The RSS file tells podcatching applications, like iTunes, when you have published a new episode (lecture) so that it will be downloaded automatically. This brings us to the last part of the process. How do students subscribe to or download your podcast:
- Set up a Feedburner feed for your course. You bloggers reading this may already know what that means. For the rest of you, Feedburner is a free service that makes it easy for others to subscribe to your podcast using programs like iTunes. This is the application that my students almost always use to get my podcasts. Once you sign up for a free Feedburner account and tell the website where your RSS file and podcast episodes live, you just need to give your students the feedburner URL for your podcast. For example, my anatomy and physiology course is found at http://feeds.feedburner.com/anatomy. When students go to that address they see:
The beauty of using Feedburner is that you do not need to maintain a website for your podcast, Feedburner does that for you. Students can then either subscribe to your podcast so that iTunes will download the episodes for them when they are posted, or they can download each individually. Feedburner will also keep stats on how many people subscribe or access your podcast.
On last bit of advice – start slow. I found that it took several weeks to get this system working smoothly. Pick one course and consider it an experiment. Let students know that you are trying this out for the first time and ask for feedback along the way. This way if things do not work students will not be relying too heavily on the podcast and will not get upset when they do not appear. I still have the occasional technical glitch that kills an episode (usually once a semester I forget to hit the record button at the beginning).
I receive very positive feedback from students about my podcasts during course evaluations and when talking to them about the course. I would highly recommend that you give this a try.
If you are already podcasting your courses please let me know in the comments section what software/techniques you use. I’d also like to know about any interesting teaching uses you have found for podcasting. I plan to post about that in the future.
Hi – thanks for this… great to see something like this being talked about as most University teaching is shockingly bad! (I used to be a Uni researcher fro 20+ years)
One question – as it’s easy to record a commentary for a presentation anyway, am I right in thinking that the two main advantages of this approach are that
a/ it captures the informality of a lecture/presentation to give a better ‘feel’; and
b/ it captures student questions as well?
Cheers….. Simon
I like this approach in part because it is the most efficient. It records the lecture/discussion that I am going to do anyway. And you are right that by recording the student questions/comments, albeit with low volume, it captures some of the dynamic of the class session. But the other benefit is the way this software writes the RSS for you and makes distribution quite easy. Students can get the lectures quickly, by that afternoon, to review that day if they choose.
What do you use to record your clients when they are doing training?
Thanks for checking it out.