Continuing my report from the Podcast and Portable Media Expo, at a session called “Succesful Podcasting in Education at the University Level,” a panel of folks from higher ed presented about how they’re using podcasting.
Dr. Michael Schmidt from the Medical University of South Carolina talked about how they justified the use of podcasting for mandatory compliance training. By delivering the training on mobile media players, he said that they were able to justify the cost of the players over just a few weeks of use in terms of time saved for their busy professionals. [I think there is a lot of potential in delivering professsional development to administrators and educators in a similar way.] When asked about how attendance was verified, he said that their assessment techniques were competency-based and that participants had to have a 100% pass rate on the assessment. [This is a model K-12 education should look at. Competency-based assessment makes a lot more sense than our current model based on “seat time.”]
Another panelist talked about using podcasting to move from a classroom lecture format to a Socratic method. In this model, students are given a podcast with the class content in advance of class and are required to come to class prepared to discuss it.
Several panelists said that rather than encouraging students to skip class, they thought podcasts made students more interested in classes and may even increase attendance as a result.
A final discussion at this session revolved around access. While some imply that “digital natives” are ubiquitous now among the under-20 crowd, an audience member challenged that assertion. [This is a real issue for K-12 education. We can’t assume that all students have devices and/or Internet access for home use, and it doesn’t seem fair to ask that those students who don’t stay after school to get access. I think that one great solution to this is providing learners with small inexpensive devices that are pre-loaded with the content they need.]
The next session was presented by Rick Klau of FeedBurner. Mr. Klau presented a lot of very valuable information about RSS feeds and related technical topics. He began with some figures that were echoed by many other presenters at the conference – iTunes represents about 60% of the RSS subscription market, and the ratio of downloads to subscriptions is about 2-to-1. [This means that twice as many people click a link to an MP3 file to listen to an episode as those who subscribe to an RSS feed. This seems astounding. If this applies to you, check out RSS subscriptions; they’re so convenient….although not universally easy to use. More on that in a subsequent post.]
Klau talked a lot about terminology and standards. Clearly, podcasts in general and RSS feeds in particular are a lot harder to access and use than they should be. For one thing, Klau defined a “podcast” as the content AND the feed. (That being the case, it doesn’t really make sense to talk about “downloading a podcast.” The correct terminology would be downloading an episode. While this may seem like meaningless semantics, when new users are visiting podcast web pages, the lack of standard terminology, etc. makes it very confusing. If you have a podcast web page or blog, do your users a favor by making sure it’s clear and easy to use. )
He also talked about using a “browser-friendly” view of your XML feed. You may have clicked on some XML feed links and gotten something that looks like HTML. Other XML feeds links look very nice though. The difference is including styles sheets. Here’s an example of what this looks like.
Klau also talked about IE7 having a built-in RSS feed reader (something that Linux and Mac have had for a while). Maybe that will prompt more people use to use RSS.
Stay tuned for links to the slides and audio from all these sessions as soon as they’re available.