‘Course Casting’ in the Media
24 11 2005Newsweek has an article “Professor In Your Pocket” which looks at the new technologies allowing university lectures to be podcast (yes, the word can be used as a verb, it’s based on broadcast!). While the article does look at the benefits a little, it dwelsl a lot on the negatives. Some excerpts:
Could ivy-covered lecture halls become as obsolete as the typewriter? This fall, a dozen colleges across the country have introduced a controversial new teaching tool called course casting, aimed at supplementing—and in some cases replacing—large, impersonal lectures. Although it has been around for less than a year, course casting has become as popular as a keg party on homecoming weekend. Students at Purdue University have downloaded 40,000 lectures since the start of the semester—not bad for a school with an enrollment of 38,000. Drexel, Stanford, Duke and American University have begun course-casting programs, too. “So far, we’ve heard mostly positive feedback about it,” says Lynne O’Brien, head of Duke’s Center for Institutional Technology. But critics complain that digital lectures delivered through earphones cut down on the vital interaction between professors and students. And parents, who shell out tens of thousands of dollars for tuition, aren’t convinced that kids who rely on the lectures-to-go are getting their money’s worth.
How many lectures have these people been to? Seminars, workshops, tutorials … that’s the core of interaction … even online discussions and blogs are better than your average lecture! Lectures, while important, still rely on a top-down delivery model. Even creative lecturers stuggle to not just deliver content. Besides which, most studies suggest students start to tune-out after 15-20 minutes (something that might be less problematic with a pause button and quick stretch at 15 minute intervals)!
… some academics worry that much is lost when sophomores scroll between audio files of a philosophy lecture and the latest hit by Franz Ferdinand. Students learn an important skill when they are required to show up for a lecture: creating a schedule and sticking to it. Being in class keeps them in regular contact with professors, which, experts say, is a key to keeping dropout rates low. Lectures, too, force students to focus for long, uninterrupted stretches. Course casting might work, says Lee Knefelkamp, a professor of education at Teachers College at Columbia University, if a professor is trying to deliver facts and concepts for later regurgitation. “Students can listen to that anywhere.” But a topnotch lecture, says Knefelkamp, “should be provocative, catch you up short and make you think in ways you never have before.” Those kinds of intellectual epiphanies, she says, rarely happen at the laundromat.
If lectures are the only regular contact points, I suspect something might be wrong! 
I agree a good lecture is a GOOD LECTURE, but flexibility is also extremely important these days.
Even course-casting fans say there are drawbacks. Given the option of not showing up, many students won’t. “We’ve been concerned that it makes it a little too easy not to have the classroom experience,” says Stanford University’s Victoria Szabo. To ensure attendance rates stay high, Stanford professors wait a month before making their lectures available on the Web. Staging can help, too. These days, Purdue criminal-forensics professor David Tate makes sure every one of his live lectures includes key visual components like blood-spatter patterns or bomb-disposal techniques. Students who opt to listen rather than attend, he says, “miss a whole lot.”
Yes, visuals, video and the physical presence of lecturers can be extremely important. That’s why almost no one would ever consider replacing lectures, but rather allowing student the flexibility to re-visit the lecture later, or to hear it if they were sick! At UWA, the iLecture / Lectopia system has been in use recording lectures for years (and cassette tapes before that). The lecture theatres are still full! (Check the research around the iLecture / Lectopia system, and you can see there’s very little dropoff in student numbers!) [Via iLounge]
A couple professors at Oklahoma City Community College has been course casting this year, too. It’s something we wanted to try and it’s been very successful.
Here’s our site: http://www.okccc.edu/mschneberger/podclass1.htm
I’m one of the few community college course casters, and the way I see it is the course casts are not the primary tools for our classes. It’s not a “choose us or choose the course cast.” Rather, we have strict attendance guidelines. We want students in our classes! So we have attendance policies to ensure they come.
However, the course casts are there to supplement the day’s information. It helps the students prepare for tests and in English classes, for the major writing assignments. Our classes are interactive. We have student discussions, and those are captured as MP3’s as well.
Course casting is like the calculator. It’s just another tool to help the students “get it.”
Mark A. Schneberger
Professor of Learning Skills
OKCCC
mschneberger@okccc.edu
http://www.okccc.edu/mschneberger/podclass1.htm
Hi Mark & Tama!
You say there are just a few of us… How many exactly? I started this semester, recording the lecture audio, and saving the output from the classroom SmartBoard. I originally did it for my WebCT students, and posted the audio with the images separately onto a static web page. Then I saw Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote talk, where he demoed laying images on top of a podcast using the new version of GarageBand. That got me thinking… and Googling… and I found Apple’s freely-available command-line tool available (Chapter Tool) which does the same thing, just way less intuitively. The Apple Podcasting FAQ describes it.
That led me to EduBlogs, because WordPress takes care of the podcast subscription html for me. I just have to post to my EduBlog with the URI of the file I created, and if I subscribe using a podcast reader, it pops up as soon as I post it. WOW! Feel free to subscribe: http://danaleighton.edublogs.org/feed/
That got me to thinking, hmmm… I guess I can turn this into Open CourseWare when I’m done… A community college seems like the logical place to host an Open Courseware curriculum (open-access is at our core). Any ideas on that?
The hassle is in coordinating the audio and image presentation. I have to listen to the audio for the right time to switch to the new whiteboard image, record the time, and tell QuickTime what image to display and when.
An additional hassle is editing the audio to take out distracting low-frequency and high-frequency sounds, and since I’m really cheap and haven’t bought a mic, I have to normalize the audio levels. It turned out to be a lot more work than I wanted it to be. It seems though, that as I learn the right steps, I should be able to use Automator to take care of some of the tasks automagically.
A system like Lectopia would be wicked. Too bad CCs are so poor.
–
Dana C. Leighton
Psychology Instructor
Tri-County Technical College
dleighto@tctc.edu - (864) 646-1387
Hi Mark & Dana,
Mark - I completely agree, the podcasting technologies are a great supplement but never replacement for lectures themselves.
Dana - Your work sounds terrific. I’ve tried a little myself with synching images and audio and it is rather time consuming althought very impressive when done right (see, for example, Lessig’s presentation). The recent developments with Lectopia are making it much easier for me, though, as they’ve just added screencapture so recording visuals and audio is happening in realtime (saves a lot of time).
As to how many “coursecasts” there are (incidentally, I hate that term because it implies lectures are the course, but that’s just my gripe), I don’t think there is a definitive number. Wesley Fryer is collating a list, though, so that might be a good place to watch.