When students switch on their iPods, they are faced with a choice to listen to thousands of different songs. But now, educators are giving them a different choice – what class to study for.

Numerous campuses across the country are beginning to use podcasts as educational tools to provide digital content to students at their convenience.

Podcasts are bits of audio or video that can be downloaded and played through either a computer or an MP3 player. Despite the fact that the word podcast is derived from the word iPod, podcasts are compatible with all MP3 players.

Syracuse University is among the schools beginning to experiment with podcasts. Both the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and SU Project Advance have signed contracts with Apple Inc. These contracts will allow them to use Apple software to provide podcasts to students.

Apple offers podcasts through a service called iTunesU, a program that allows universities to distribute educational podcasts through iTunes software. iTunes is the leading provider of legally downloaded media in the United States, including music, movies and television.

Newhouse hopes to offer podcasting technology to its staff by the end of April, said Chris Aliberto, director of Computing Services at Newhouse.

‘We are in the process of essentially just figuring out the best way to implement it,’ he said.

Rob Pusch, the instructional designer for Project Advance, said podcasts will make his program’s information distribution method cheaper and more efficient.

Project Advance allows SU courses to be taught in more than 130 high schools across the region. The project trains high school teachers to instruct the courses as adjunct faculty and equips them with the appropriate information to pass on to students.

As of now, the digital information required to teach those courses is burned onto CDs and shipped to high schools in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maine and Michigan.

This task is time consuming and expensive, but Pusch said he hopes to alleviate those problems by putting that same information on the Internet in podcast form for teachers to download. This will save time and money, and can be done primarily with existing technology, he said.

Marlene Blumin, a SU professor, teaches a Project Advance course called College Learning Strategies 105, which includes small group discussions. This semester, she will begin to record some of those discussions and turn them into podcasts so both college and high school students can have more options to receive the information.

‘I want students to be able to have the information in whatever vehicle is convenient and effective for them to have it,’ she said.

Blumin was also one of the first professors to use the Blackboard Learning System, a Web site where teachers can post announcements, grades and hold class discussions through forums. She said she is driven to new technologies by a desire to have material more accessible.

‘I guess I’m always looking for something new and different,’ she said.

While podcasts are beginning to emerge at Syracuse, other universities across the country have been using them for more than a year and are already beginning to see results. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, podcasts were first offered in September 2005 and have since expanded to nearly every department on campus.

Jan Cheetham, project manager of Academic Technology at Wisconsin-Madison, said professors and students have given mostly positive feedback about podcasts and have found them easy to use.

‘I think we’re seeing more people who might have been a little cautious about trying something new have attempted podcasting and found it to be pretty doable,’ he said.

Wisconsin-Madison professors have used podcasts to distribute a wide range of materials, including mock radio programs in German and celebrity interviews in Spanish. One professor made more than 200 bird calls into podcasts so his students could memorize them from their computers or mp3 players.

‘That was a really nice innovation because it made it easy for all students to get those recordings rather than going to the library to get a CD,’ Cheetham said.

Professors at Wisconsin-Madison do not usually make full lectures into podcasts, Cheetham said. Rather, they frequently use them to distribute optional supplemental material.

Blumin said she will do the same, and trusts her students will know that listening to a podcast is not a substitute for attending class.

Outside of the classroom, podcasts have been used for more than three years in various forms. The media typically use them as supplemental audio programming, like actor or director commentary, said R. David Lankes, a professor of information studies at SU.

Lankes has been using podcasts for more than two years to distribute speeches he gives through his Web site. As their popularity rises, Lankes sees a promising future for podcasts in education.

‘As more and more of the material goes online, it makes sense to use podcasts as a way of distributing that audio to your students and a potentially larger audience,’ he said.

The transition to using podcasts throughout the university would not be a difficult one, Lankes said. The university already has the technology in place to support podcasts on the Internet, and would see no need to outsource the project to iTunesU.

‘Really the technical threshold for doing this stuff is really low,’ he said. ‘There isn’t a lot of need to have Apple step in and do it or anyone else. We have all the infrastructure to do it as we need.’

Lankes added that iTunesU may be appealing to some because of Apple’s interface and marketing. Using iTunesU requires that students download the iTunes software.

At Wisconsin-Madison, students did not object to this as many of them already had the software, Cheetham said.

Project Advance already has the technological capacity to host podcasts without iTunes and will soon have to decide whether to make podcasts available through iTunes or through its Web site, Pusch said.

Freshman Julian Vaiana said he would be interested in seeing podcasts integrated into his classes. While he owns an iPod, he would use podcasts more from his computer, and they would not change his attendance habits, he said.

‘I would just use them for studying,’ Vaiana said.

Published on February 26, 2007 at 12:00 pm