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Credit: Nick Romanenko
Geoffrey Buhl, a postdoctoral fellow in
the statistics department, uses blogs,
instant messaging and podcasting in
teaching undergraduate courses. Rutgers
is working on making podcasting an easy
service that instructors at any
technical level can use.
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Instructors soon will be able to transmit their class lectures and materials to students in an instant using podcasting, a technology that has caught fire since the introduction of the portable MP3 player.
While staff at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CAT) in New Brunswick have set up a test system in Scott Hall for transmitting lectures to MP3s with just the push of a button, other faculty and staff members across Rutgers’ three campuses are taking up podcasting for a variety of instructional uses. And personnel across all three campuses soon may benefit from a new partnership between Rutgers and Apple’s iTunes service. Rutgers is negotiating an agreement with Apple to create a Web site specifically for Rutgers that would deliver course lectures, special events, campus information and other content to faculty, staff and students.
Staff at the School of Law-Newark use podcasting to capture audio from special events, such as lectures and symposia. Faculty working with the Honors College in Camden took a page from National Public Radio and launched a creative writing course project modeled after the program “This American Life.” First-year students write and record narratives based on their experiences with college life.
Some faculty members, like postdoctoral fellow Geoffrey Buhl in the statistics department in New Brunswick/Piscataway, already use podcasting on their own to record their lectures. Buhl employs podcasting in addition to course blogs and office hours via instant messaging to enhance his teaching.
“I like that podcasting puts pressure on me to make the classroom environment more valuable to students than just having to listen to me,” Buhl said. “If I say to students I have these written notes and the lecture audio and I am going to publish them, I hope providing that information frees students up for more class participation.”
Podcasting’s impact on class attendance has been a concern for many faculty members; however, note-taking services, lectures streamed to Web sites and faculty members providing their own class notes were all met with the same concern. As far as economics professor Gary Gigliotti is concerned, the more material students have at hand, the more likely they are to succeed.
“Research on learning says that the more students are in contact with subject matter, the more they learn – even through casual conversations with friends at lunch,” said Gigliotti, who is also director of the CAT. “I have no doubt podcasting will work if it is relevant, available and easy to use.”
Gayle Stein, an associate director in the Office of Instructional and Research Technology, said instructors can customize their use of podcasting to avoid drops in class attendance. “If you podcast part of your class, let’s say a difficult section, you don’t have to podcast the rest of your class,” she said. “There are ways to use podcasting to focus on complex topics without putting students in the position where they don’t have to show up for class at all.”
The name “podcasting” is a bit of a misnomer since podcasts can be downloaded to any type of MP3 player, not just Apple’s popular iPod. The test model that CAT is developing requires the completion of a Web form before class, and the push of a button just before class begins in an “enhanced” classroom. An instructor speaks into a microphone to record the lecture and may provide students with an additional microphone if he or she would like class discussion to be included in the recording. The instructor gives students an Internet address, which they enter into a program such as iTunes, and within seconds after class ends, the recording is delivered to student subscribers. A student only has to subscribe once to receive automatically every recorded lecture for the remainder of the semester.
“It was important for us to make the technology easy for faculty to use without needing to learn how to do new things or change the way they are teaching,” said Joseph Delaney, an instructional technology specialist at CAT. “I’m sure the faculty using it will have opinions, and we will probably change and improve it based on their feedback.”
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