2006 Campus Technology Innovators: Podcasting
TECHNOLOGY AREA: PODCASTING
Innovator: Marist College
MARIST COLLEGE puts iPOD content in the hands of students. |
Challenge Met
Although educational podcasting is quickly
spreading across colleges and universities as
a great way for students to consume relevant
content almost anywhere, Marist College
(NY) is turning that model on its ear. Rather
than replicating a traditional lecture format
by loading students up with pre-recorded
podcasts, Marist is forging a more constructivist
approach in which the students themselves
generate and share their own content.
It all started when Marist students studying
abroad began inquiring
about taking online
courses while overseas,
in order to meet general
education requirements
that the host institution was unable to
provide. Not wanting to defeat the purpose of
going abroad in the first place, a remarkable
collaboration among faculty, administration,
the Office of Academic Technology, and the
college’s Media Center sought to offer the students
an alternative—a “Quest” learning
model—that would deepen the study-abroad
experience and not allow students to rely on
the “crutch” of their home institution’s eLearning
resources.
“Podcasting is usually thought of as a
teacher-centered activity in which the teacher
sends lectures to the students,” explains
Kevin Gaugler, associate professor of modern
languages and assistant dean of the
School of Liberal Arts at Marist.“Our project
is leveraging the collective intelligence of the
students…combining cutting-edge, taskedbased
pedagogical approaches with an
approach to podcasting sometimes known as
social podcasting or group podcasting.” This
model offers both the convenience of learning
online and the richness of an on-the-ground
study-abroad experience.
How They Did It
A large team contributed to the pedagogical
and technological design of the project.
Among them, Gaugler designed the Quest
learning model and provided leadership on
the use of iPods and podcasting abroad.
Meg Franklin, assistant dean of academic
affairs and professional lecturer of English,
contributed much of the theoretical framework
to make the first Quest offering,
iDentity Quest, a class on the components of national and regional identities. And staff
and student workers from the Office of Academic
Technology and eLearning, directed by
Josh Baron, created a web-based form that
updated an RSS feed so that any student in
the course could add to the feed without
knowledge of XML.
The team wanted to make the technology
as transparent as possible and selected
Apple’s iPod Photo, one of the only devices
that could both record and receive podcasts.
Griffin Technology’s iTalk was needed to add recording
capabilities—and the company generously
donated 20 units for the pilot. Audacity
(audacity.sourceforge.net) was a natural
choice for audio editing due to its ease of use
and its GNU General Public License.
The Office of Academic Technology and
eLearning created a course “shell” or website
in the college’s course management system
called Educator (Ucompass
technology), for use in the iDentity
Quest project. The course environment
was configured to
support uploading of MP3 files
directly by students in an
easy-to-follow process. This
online environment also
supported the interactions
between faculty and students
and among students
themselves via use of online
discussion forums, e-mail,
and chat.
Next Steps
Marist is in the process of testing an open
source set of PHP scripts dubbed Podcast
Generator,
with which the school hopes to be
able to scale the project over the coming
semesters. There is also preliminary discussion
of working to integrate these capabilities
into the Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment
that is in the early testing stage at
the college.
Advice
Baron offers a word of caution to those who
would send technology-toting students
abroad: “Students need to be trained carefully
before they leave their home institution in
order to ensure they have mastered the technical
skills to complete projects. Working
closely with your media center will help enormously
to address these challenges.”
