Podcasting Phenomenon/�

Podcasting Phenomenon:a discussion on the development of podcasting as a professional medium for learning

Part I Current useWhat is podcasting?The word podcasting is derived from iPod – Apple’s ubiquitous media player – and broadcasting. Most podcasts are audio files, similar to segments of broadcast radio, available for download by subscription.

Digitised media files (such as audio in MP3 or AAC format) can be made available on a website to be downloaded and played on a computer or media player such as an iPod. This would create a passive store of files through which the recipient would have to search for new material. Many media downloads dubbed podcasts are of this nature. However, this is a misnomer.

A true podcast also includes subscription, so that once the visitor has subscribed - often a one-click process - new podcasts from that source will be downloaded to their player or browser automatically without having to return to the site and search.

The subscription service normally used is RSS (really simple syndication). When media files made available through Podcasting are posted to a site, the publisher updates an accompanying RSS file with the new media file’s name, topic description, length and location. Recipients subscribe to the publisher’s RSS feed once. Then each time the recipients are online their web browser or iTunes (see iTunes page 2) polls the RSS feed for new entries and automatically downloads any new content.

Podcasts are often associated with blogs (weblogs), a regular posting to which readers’ comments can be appended and downloads, such as podcasts, can be attached by the author. Subscribing via RSS to a blog which contains podcasts will download the podcasts automatically as new content along with the blog each time the subscriber logs on to the internet.

Podcasts are platform agnostic and work equally well on PC or Mac computers. There are an increasing number of applications, such as GarageBand from Apple and Open Source alternatives, for creating podcasts.

Podcasts are not confined to audio files: JPEG still images, PDF documents and MPEG4 video can also form part of enhanced podcasts. Podcasts containing video are sometimes referred to as vodcasts or videocasts. But the majority of podcasts are audio-only or audio with images. There are fewer video-capable players and audio podcasts are simpler to make and easier to consume on portable players.

GrowthThe ubiquity of the hardware – some 60 million iPods have been sold worldwide to date – and the rapid increase in players capable of handling video, such as the iPod, means podcasts will quickly be established as a recognised medium alongside more familiar media such as print, radio, tv, film and the internet.

Forward-looking media organisations with high-value content, such as the UK’s BBC, are experimenting with mostly audio podcasts. So far audiences are small compared to traditional broadcast media. But recognising the potentially broad appeal, media companies expect the popularity of podcasts to grow rapidly over the next few years.

Aside from media companies, profit-making and not-for-profit organisations are also exploring podcasting as a means of disseminating information, such as for training courses. We will turn our attention to the use of podcasting in media organisations and wider industry later in this paper.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Podcasting – rich media files available for download through automatic subscription - is a new and rapidly growing medium.

Education establishments in the US and Europe have caught on to the potential of podcasts for recording lectures, lessons and other learning materials and as a new medium for students to submit work and express their creativity.

Media companies, from traditional broadcasters to newspapers, are experimenting with podcasts distributed to a select but growing audience. And podcasts are finding application in industry in general for training and public relations.

One of the reasons why podcasts appeal to a new generation of digital consumers and increasingly mobile workers is their portability: podcasts can be consumed on the go, using either a laptop computer or portable media player, such as an iPod.

This paper looks at examples of current usage of podcasting, in education, media and wider industry, and speculates about the role this technology will play in the fundamental changes occurring in education in the near future.

ContentsWhat is podcasting? �Education – current use 2Media 5Training 6Public relations 6Education – future use 6

In association with Apple

2/Podcasting Phenomenon

EdUCATIOnOne area of life where podcasting has already found more widespread acceptance is education. In establishments as diverse as the HEC business school in Paris to Sandaig Primary school in Glasgow, podcasts are being used to disseminate information, such as lectures to students, or school-magazine-style audio programmes.

A podcast’s content can be anything conveyed by an audio or video file: a recorded lecture, a foreign language or music lesson or a demonstration of biology principles from an external source.

Podcasts are also an ideal way of integrating learning materials from external experts with standard curriculum texts or materials generated in-house, deepening and personalising the learning experience.

Podcasts are also being used by students and pupils themselves as an alternative means of presenting information which would otherwise be handwritten. Teachers whose pupils frequently make podcasts attest to the technology’s power to engage pupils, build literacy and oratory skills and develop confidence and teamwork.

The use of podcasting in schools and colleges in Europe is largely a grassroots movement, driven by enthusiastic teachers and students.

Digital lifestyleIt is no wonder that podcasts appeal to students and pupils. The boom in downloadable music, which started in the late 1990s, means that most young people of school or college age are familiar with the principles of downloading media files from the internet. The roaring success of Apple’s iPod and iTunes Music Store has built on this. The iPod is seen as a cool product, ergo using it as a learning tool makes school attractive to pupils.

Furthermore, there is growing realisation among forward-thinking educators that the factory-style learning of the previous century is no longer a viable model for teaching the latest generation of technologically savvy students for whom interaction and collaboration is de rigour. The traditional chalk-and-talk lecture-style of teaching fails to engage those who daily use interactive digital tv and swap digital media in online forums.

“In the last century we built big entities that did things for people - the BBC, a national rail network etc - but in this century it’s much more about helping people help each other,” says Professor Stephen Heppell, chief executive of international learning research and policy consultancy heppell.net. “The big success stories are eBay, Google etc. Like podcasting, they are essentially symmetrical applications: you consume and you produce at the same time. Crucially, these democratising technologies give people a voice. Everyone can make a contribution.”

UsageTeachers can use podcasts to disseminate routine information, such as lesson plans, topic backgrounds, homework assignments and the fundamentals of lessons, in class or remotely from the school network. This reduces the amount of chalk-and-talk time, increases the time pupils can spend in smaller collaborative groups where learning is more intensified and generally freeing the teacher to be more creative.

Audio files of lessons can also be distributed automatically via podcast to those who were unable to attend.

iTunes

iTunes is Apple’s client which provides personal access to its Music Store. The iTunes Music Store is used increasingly by organisations to store podcasts which can contain audio, video or pdf files.

In the US, higher education institutions can run an instance of iTunes Music Store called iTunes U, providing a public or private repository of education media files.

“iTunes U will make education content distribution as easy as music distribution,” says Herve Marchet, Apple director of EMEA education markets.

Podcasting Phenomenon/�

Personal VLEThe growth of podcasting as a popular means of disseminating education content has led some schools to look at providing iPods for students. The integral hard disk can be used to carry the student’s work, timetable, school correspondence and become a private portable part of the student’s virtual learning environment (VLE).

Notschool.net is a research project in which Heppell is involved, aimed at re-engaging young people of school age who for a variety of personal and logistical reasons have been out of the traditional educational system. Students of Notschool.net are called researchers.

“In the early days we gave Notschool researchers iPod Shuffles where they kept their e-portfolios,” says Heppell. “So when they go for an interview and are asked, ‘so what have you done?’ they whip out the Shuffle and answer ‘let me show you’. Now they’re doing that on iPods with screens.”

ProducersThe real power of podcasts for school-age learners is realised when the pupils become producers as well as consumers.

“The role of teachers is changing from delivering content to a knowledge coach,” says Alexandre Bonucci, vice chancellor IT at University of Lyon II. “Teaching used to be about teachers delivering content to passive students. Now teaching is much more interactive, an act of common construction between teacher and student using the media.”

Using technology with a high perceived cool value can be used to engage otherwise disaffected pupils. Podcasts produced in small groups encourage collaborative learning and team-working. Producing podcasts improves literacy through script-writing and through researching the script, topic knowledge is imparted almost by stealth. Recording audio develops oratory skills and builds confidence, especially if pupils’ podcasts are distributed to a wider audience than class peers and positive feedback encouraged from the audience, for example by podcasting a school magazine.

“In the media it’s about sounding like BBC Radio 4, but in education, the fact that you’re doing it is almost as important as the content, because you are opening up a new channel of communication with parents and the wider school community,” says Jimmy Leach, editor of Public, The Guardian’s public sector supplement and formerly editor of the newspaper’s education section.

At Sandaig Primary in Glasgow, year five and six pupils podcast a chatshow-style programme called Radio Sandaig, scripted, recorded and edited by the pupils mostly in their own time.

“Over the course of two years, I can listen to children now and compare it with their original podcasts and I can hear the difference in their speaking,” says John Johnston, year six teacher. “It impacts on things like self confidence and self awareness, a whole spectrum of skills in personal social development (PSD), which are not so easy to pin down and measure.”

Lecture by podcastIn higher education, again, podcasting can be used to automatically disseminate routine information, such as course plans, backgrounders and generic information about the college which would otherwise require physical distribution via handouts.

POdCASTIng OffERS A nUMbER Of bEnEfITS TO EdUCATORS

• Engages learners

• Promotes personalisation and collaboration in teaching

• Uses familiar interface, medium and equipment

• Ubiquitous device of consumption – portable media player or web browser

• Relatively small investment in equipment required to get started

• Intuitive software for creation, eg iLife ‘06 from Apple

• Relatively low level of technical skills required to get started

• Ubiquity of free open source editing and distribution software

• Automates dissemination of routine information

• frees up time for tutorial work

• Opens new channel of communication for students

• builds literacy and oratory skills, confidence and teamwork

• Enables students to review lectures and lessons without taking verbatim notes

• frees students of the constraints of the physical classroom

• Assists distance learning model

• Moves towards an on-demand teaching material model

• Enables students with lower traditional literacy skills to participate in learning at all levels

• Ease of integrating learning material from external experts

�/Podcasting Phenomenon

POdCASTIng LECTURES AT UnIVERSITY Of bRAdfORd

dr bill Ashraf, senior lecturer in microbiology at the University of bradford, caused a stir in late May 2006 when he told the bbC he wouldn’t be doing any premier first-year lectures in the next academic year.

Instead, he will podcast the lectures and spend the time he saves on more tutorial-style teaching which he says his students find more valuable.

“Lectures are not the most efficient way of imparting information to students,” says Ashraf. “There is the logistical problem of getting 250 people plus me into the same room at the same time. When you ask students, they would prefer to be taught in smaller groups where they can focus on case studies and applying the course material to specific problems or assignments.”

Ashraf experimented with podcast lectures for a year and received positive feedback from students. “I’ve never had a class in the final year that has wanted to interact so much and have asked such detailed, penetrating thought-provoking questions,” he says.

Entire lectures can also be podcast with an audio recording synchronised with visuals aides or images provided by the instructor. This can be used by distance learners or those otherwise unable to attend the lecture. But it also has great value to those who were present for the live lecture, freeing them from making verbatim notes because the lecture is available for review.

“Sometimes students spend the whole lecture with their heads down and never look up at the slides,” says Adam Burt, technical tutor at Ravensbourne College. “Knowing the lecture is podcast means there’s less angst in terms of note-taking.”

Once a library of podcast lectures and learning material has been established, students can access it at will, reviewing lectures on demand to assist revision or to cover for absences.

HEC, a business school located near Versailles, France, has signed a two-year partnership with Apple to integrate iPods and other Apple technologies into its undergraduate business and MBA programmes.

When the MBA class starts at HEC in the 2006/07 academic year, about half of the lectures will be captured as digital video and provided for students to download as video podcasts an hour later. Every student will be given an iPod with video capability, engraved with the school logo, which can be used for the course and to play the student’s personal music and video files.

The iPods will come preloaded with a message from the Dean, HEC’s RSS feeds, class schedule and campus maps. Day-to-day the iPods can be used to view the video lectures and other course materials, to subscribe to news feeds from European news media, for language training, to access HEC’s digital library and still leave room for the student’s personal choice of music and video.

The iPods will allow HEC and its students to show how these technologies can be integrated into higher education and business, not just as a delivery mechanism for course material, but also by students creating new content.

More tutorialsFurthermore, reducing the time lecturers spend delivering traditional lectures can increase the time available for tutorial sessions with smaller groups. Here, learning is focused on specific issues rather than the broad sweep of the subject; it is personalised in the sense that students take responsibility for the pace at which they learn; and it is collaborative, with students dividing research topics among a small group with common interests and assisting each other to learn under the guidance of the tutor.

See University of Bradford for an example of podcast lectures in practice.

Student assignmentsEncouraging podcasts as a means of filing assignments is not confined to school-age students. Podcasts can also be used effectively in higher education and lend themselves especially to subjects such as broadcasting or other courses that require audio work.

See Ravensbourne College for an example of students creating podcasts in HE on page 6.

This is especially relevant for students, such as dyslexics, who lack highly attuned traditional learning and communication literacy skills. See Podcasting offers a number of benefits to educators on page 3.

Podcasting Phenomenon/5

Ease of useTeachers and lecturers quite rightly point out that they are often too busy teaching to spend time learning how to get the best from a new technology, or that the equipment required is beyond their budget.

However, at an individual level podcasts of lessons can be created from a single personal computer running GarageBand from Apple. “There’s no more upfront work to be done to record a lecture than to use a felt-tip pen on an acetate and very little technical knowledge is required,” says Dr Bill Ashraf, senior lecturer in microbiology at the University of Bradford.

As podcasting becomes more popular in education and moves beyond the realm of enthusiasts towards established best practice, systems such as Apple’s Podcasting Server are emerging which enable teaching staff with near-zero technical skills to automate the production of podcasts on an institution-wide basis.

The University of Lyon II, in France, has already started to offer an automated podcasting service to lecturers. Bonucci describes it as revolutionary technology because it removes the need for IT knowledge among teaching staff.

“The benefit for the teacher is that he doesn’t have to be a computer scientist,” says Bonucci. “You can’t expect a professor of philosophy to know Java Script and XML – it’s not their job.”

MEdIAIn the UK it is no surprise that the BBC, with it’s wealth of radio programming, leads the field in audio downloads and podcasts. In total, BBC Radio audio files were downloaded 2.8 million times in March 2006, up more than a million since February.

However, companies usually associated with a single medium, such as UK newspapers The Guardian and News International’s The Times, have also branched out into podcasting. See Potted history of podcasting at The Guardian on page 7.

“We rely on our foreign correspondents and expertise within The Guardian a great deal for content,” says Neil McIntosh, assistant editor of The Guardian’s website, Guardian Unlimited. “A lot of it is discussion-based rather than heavily scripted. We don’t want to sound like [BBC] Radio 4. The idea is to have our own voice and develop something that is unique.”

The Guardian’s podcast programmers use historical data from Guardian Unlimited to guide their choice of subject matter, but The Guardian’s use of podcasting is still in pilot phase, so there is value in experimenting too.

“We cover a broad range of subjects and treatments so we can see what works and what doesn’t,” says McIntosh. While experimenting, Guardian podcasters are also picking up valuable experience and know-how, he adds.

Recognising the multi-channel nature of modern media consumption and specifically the rise of mobile consumption, media companies are likely to increase their output of podcasts as they develop multimedia capability.

6/Podcasting Phenomenon

POdCASTIng SERVICE AT RAVEnSbOURnE COLLEgE

Ravensbourne is a vocationally led college focussing on the creative industries. In 2006 the College launched a blog service for students and staff, enabling them to create a blog simply as part of its Open Source Moodle VLE.

Some students and teaching staff have already included podcasts in their blogs and as of the following academic year, a fully supported podcasting service will be available to all.

“Podcasting relates very well to many of the courses we have here, like creative sound design and broadcasting,” says Adam burt, technical Tutor at Ravensbourne College. “Students can use their blogs with podcasts to promote their work.”

TRAInIngThere is also growing interest among industry generally in the podcasting phenomenon. According to Personnel Today, hospitals in Glasgow are using podcasts to provide new staff with an audio induction on issues such as workplace safety, infection control and coping with violence, followed by a computer-based knowledge test.

The podcast training is used for theatre staff at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, in the labour ward and neonatal unit at the Princess Royal Maternity Hospital and is being introduced at the Western Infirmary’s Accident and Emergency department.

Other health authorities in the UK and Europe have reportedly expressed an interest in the concept.

PUbLIC RELATIOnSThe increasing ubiquity of portable media players and mobile phones capable of handling rich media podcasts, especially among the young, means organisations would do well to consider podcasting as part of their communications mix as a viable and convenient media channel appealing to student-age and tech-savvy audiences.

“You can reach people you couldn’t talk to before, says Marchet. “Your sphere of influence just opened up. Now you can make rich media available and reach people in whatever way they choose to learn.”

For example, since 2000, CERN, the particle physics research centre in Geneva, has webcast live programmes to promote its work. CERN is currently building a new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), due to be operational in 2007. In preparation, CERN’s management is considering new material, explaining the benefits of the LHC and particle physics in general, to be produced as a fortnightly series of five to 15min video podcasts.

“CERN has a mandate from the European member state council for communication and education, even though it is not a university,” says Silvano de Gennaro, head of multimedia productions at CERN. “The main reason is to motivate young people with aspirations to become scientists to consider physics. To do that we use the channels and media that they prefer, so video podcasting is an obvious choice for us because we already have programming on streaming media.”

“We want to publish podcasts on iTunes so they will be immediately visible to great many people who are searching for science-related subjects,” says de Gennaro.

Part II How will podcasting develop in education?

Podcasting is already entrenched in education as can be seen from the examples above. But how is this likely to develop? Does podcasting threaten or compliment the traditional role of the teacher? Will usage dwindle once the novelty is over?

Many educators believe that podcasting will assist in developing otherwise neglected skills and help education institutions find ways to adapt to the changing needs of learners.

Podcasting Phenomenon/�

POTTEd HISTORY Of POdCASTIng AT THE gUARdIAn

for some years The guardian was posting four-minute monologues from foreign correspondents as downloadable Real Audio files to its website, guardian Unlimited. “but no one addressed the issue of why the audio was happening and how we were going to develop it,” says neil McIntosh, assistant editor of guardian Unlimited.

The recent advent of RSS-enabled blogs by guardian correspondents was a natural fit with podcasting, enabling journalists to podcast with little technological development. but the real breakthrough came when comedian and writer Ricky gervais began weekly podcast shows, featuring writing partner Stephen Merchant and sidekick Karl Pilkington, on The guardian Unlimited in december 2005.

In its first month the show averaged 26�,6�0 downloads a week, making it not just the most popular podcast of its time by a far, but also a poster child for podcasting per se and significantly raising the profile of podcasting as a viable medium.

Today The guardian has a studio, in-house audio production experts and a partnership with a production company. They produce about five hours of programming a week, across various subjects.

The guardian plunged into online publishing earlier and in greater depth than many of its European competitors, so it has established data on what subjects interest visitors – data which is used to guide the podcast programming.

Oratory“Every employer values the way that you speak in an interview, but the National Curriculum doesn’t value oratory at all,” says Heppell. “Many of us will have a school report that says “if only his written work was as good as his spoken contributions” as if that was the child’s fault and not the school’s for failing to value the spoken contribution and only valuing the written contribution. What you see with podcasting is a broader definition of literacy that values oratory, students’ ability to offer narrative, anecdote and annotation in spoken word.”

For every student of whatever ability, podcasts can be a vital part of their personal electronic portfolio to show prospective employers and for creative students to promote their work.

“Graduates will put their blog on their business cards as a good way of promoting their work without an agent,” says Burt.

CollaborationA podcasting infrastructure will enable schools and colleges to easily integrate learning materials from external sources. Students can subscribe to the blogs and podcasts of the top experts in the topic they are studying, deepening their knowledge and helping each other to learn by sharing material. In turn, the experts can recruit a wider audience for their knowledge.

The pedagogy of collaborative knowledge discovery may seem at odds with the concept of a national curriculum as imposed in many European schools, where a body of learning is mandated at governmental level and didactically communicated through professional instructors. But, Heppell argues, how sensible is a national curriculum in a global society?

“We live in a global society: my shoes are made in China, my shirt in India and my computer was assembled in Ireland,” says Heppell. “We’re moving towards [distributed] global learning. You’ll focus on a shared topic, find other interested people, come together and listen to their contributions, make you own, assemble all this and maybe thread a narrative through it. But synchronous distributed learning isn’t feasible [because of time differences] so recording becomes important.”

International business schools, such as CHN in the Netherlands which franchises its courses to overseas colleges, have already begun to put this into practice.

“We have guest lecturers that provide highly valuable content,” says CHN president Robert Veenstra. “We can distribute it easily via iTunes or another RSS feed worldwide to [our campuses in] Thailand, South Africa, China and Qatar.”

CelebrationCommunicating students’ work to a wider audience is seen to be a great motivator to students to excel. As a new channel of communication with which it is inexpensive to produce content and from which it is easy to consume, podcasting will likely play a role in future ways for schools and colleges to reach out to their wider constituents, as seen at Musselburgh Grammar School and others.

“Smart universities are realising that celebration is important, says Heppell. “I’m talking to a group of children in south London about the design of their school and they say “the problem with the design of our school is that people around here don’t know how good we are”. They need channels to show how good they are.”

�/Podcasting Phenomenon

MarketingAn important part of this wider audience is prospective students and some establishments, such as CHN, are already using podcast e-brochures to attract students. Financial pressures are increasing competition among universities colleges and business schools offering vocational courses, especially in the lucrative overseas students market. Podcasting offers an inexpensive channel for show-casing the college with, for example, alumni testimonials and sample course material.

“It’s a very competitive market with overseas students and we have to be more flexible,” says Bradford’s Ashraf, who sees his university developing to regard learners more as customers than students.

AlumniPodcasting is also a viable way for universities and colleges to keep in touch with the community of alumni. There is enormous value that alumni can bring to current students, showing how they’ve applied what they learned in college in the real world.

For example, graduates of business schools can show how they’ve applied the various business models to real life challenges in their organisations.

Remote learningOne area where podcasting can have the most dramatic impact – and potentially one of the most controversial – is distance learning.

Often regarded by academics as an inferior form of learning, distance learning is on the increase. In 2004 a report by analysts at Gartner predicted that by 2009 half of all courses will be a hybrid of face-to-face and distance learning and that 80 percent of all learning content will be available on mobile platforms.

This move to distance learning is driven by some fundamental shifts in HE and society itself.

As semi- and unskilled jobs migrate to low-wage zones in developing nations, European workers must move up the economic foodchain by gaining new skills. European governments would like to see between half and two-thirds of all school leavers going on to HE and espouse a culture of life-long learning and continuous professional development (CPD) for all adults.

“If you took two-thirds of the school-leavers and sent them all to college for three years, imagine the cost to the economy,” says Heppell. “The ability to dip into learning resources if you’re in a full time job puts you in charge of your own education.”

As higher proportions of the population attend HE, it cannot be guaranteed that the majority of students will have the skills to cope with traditional learning environments. The ability to review and interact with podcast learning materials will be vital.

“French universities have had a specific style of discourse and if you have traditional learning skills then you will be comfortable with this style of discourse, but if you don’t then you may struggle,” says Bonucci. “[Podcasting] technologies help to bridge this learning gap, presenting content in a way which students without traditional learning skills can relate to.”

Podcasting Phenomenon/�

AbOUT THIS PAPER

This paper is an ongoing study of the use of podcasting in the professional realm produced by Idg global Solutions in cooperation with Apple’s European education team.

In education, media and industry at large, people are just beginning to discover the power of podcasting as a professional learning tool and are at various stages of development. Consequently it is intended that this paper will be updated regularly to reflect the progress made. It is also intended that future editions of this paper will be accompanied with rich media attachments, such as audio and video of interviews with the contributors.

This paper is meant as a catalyst for discussion. Please feel free to send your comments and experience of podcasting to the authors via pp@euro-apple.com

The authors would like to thank all those who freely contributed their time and thoughts to this paper.

Prof Stephen Heppell www.heppell.net

Jimmy Leach, neil McIntoshwww.guardian.co.uk

Alexandre bonucci www.univ-lyon2.fr

John Johnston www.sandaigprimary.co.uk/radio_sandaig/index.php

Adam burt www.rave.ac.uk

dan Read www.rave.ac.uk

dr bill Ashraf www.brad.ac.uk

Silvano de gennaro www.cern.ch

Robert Veenstra www.chn.nl

Andy Ramsdenwww.ltss.bristol.ac.uk

Besides the cost, in some European countries full-time residential HE is reaching saturation point. This will necessarily mean, if not an erosion, then certainly a dilution of the traditional HE model of three-year full-time residential degree courses.

As universities raise fees and governments reduce grants, only the wealthy elite will be able to afford full-time HE. The majority will attend short vocational courses while in full- or part-time employment, with each course taking them to the next level of their career.

“I’ve talked to healthcare professionals who want their workers to obtain a degree by studying one day a week,” says Ashraf. “How good would it be for those students to have the podcasts of lectures before they come so they can drill down in detail on the day they are in the college and make the most of the time they have? Traditional lectures aren’t suitable for them. They need a bespoke session. They can’t just knock on my door and ask me to explain something in the same way that my residential students can.”

“We have students for one day or two evenings a week and deliver learning materials via the internet,” says Veentstra. “It means they can spend the time they are in the university as quality time between student and tutor.”

Distance learning technologies such as podcasting will also encourage greater participation from those who are often currently excluded from traditional HE, such as the disabled, those with family commitments or those whose occupation or social circumstances that mean they rarely live in one location for more than a few months.

Teaching skillsBut will the inexorable rise in distance learning mean the demise of traditional teaching skills?

That is unlikely, even in highly dispersed education establishments, such as CHN, students still require guidance in selecting and interpreting learning materials.

“There will always be a tutor and a lecturer,” says Veenstra. “But I think that we will develop a lot of content available as podcasts. Podcasting will bring together the remote campuses because all the material will be available throughout the university and we can use it efficiently.”

Distance learning will never replace contact time with staff,” says Burt. “It gives students the ability to dip in and out of the content they choose and provides an enriched environment for them to learn in.”

Value of knowledgeThere is the fear that teaching materials from reputable universities will be stolen and used by unauthorised teachers to provide a copy of the same course at a lower fee.

“We’ve had requests to move material from open public access to the [private] VLE because they are concerned about competitors,” says Andy Ramsden, Learning Technology Adviser at the University of Bristol.

However, in the US leading colleges have made their course content publicly available in podcasts, seeing this as a way of promoting the college and of democratising knowledge.

�0/Podcasting Phenomenon

COnCLUSIOn

Currently in Europe, podcasting in education is largely the domain of enthusiastic students and teaching staff who have combined their imaginations and technical skills. The wider developments we have discussed in part two of this paper will be realised only if podcasting moves out of the realm of the individual enthusiast and becomes an institution-wide practice as it is beginning to do in US universities.

This will require a podcasting infrastructure, such as Podcast Server from Apple, to enable lecturers with near-zero technical skills produce high-quality podcasts of their lectures using a simple start/stop control on a laptop. It will also enable students to create and submit assignments as podcasts without the technology diverting their attention from the topic.

There will also have to be changes in the way students are assessed on their contributions: tutors will have to decide whether a �0min enhanced podcast carries the same academic weight as a �,000-word essay.

At the final assessment, podcasting in education is another medium which facilitates the individual to contribute to the common body of knowledge. Its ease of creation and consumption, its symmetrical nature and its current momentum means it is unlikely to be a passing fad.

The development of civilisation began with the recording of knowledge, first as oratory and later in various written forms. The ability to capture knowledge and pass it from generation to generation in an accessible form is the key to advancement.

UC BerkeleyFor example, in April 2006 the University of California, Berkeley launched Berkeley on iTunes U, a free service that makes video and audio recordings of a growing number of course lectures available both on and off campus through the iTunes Store.

Berkeley on iTunes U is open to the public as well as to all UC Berkeley students, bringing the campus’s multimedia assets under one UC Berkeley-branded media gateway.

“As a public university, UC Berkeley has a tradition of openness,” said Obadiah Greenberg, product manager for UC Berkeley’s site. “It really speaks to our motto - fiat lux - let there be light.”

As prof Heppell says: “Podcasting is a democratising technology and that is what gives it its power.”

In association with Apple © 2006