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.

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

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