A Reason to Podcast

You don't have to travel far to encounter people with white buds in their ears, connected to white wires, tethered to machines almost as thin as a credit card holding mountains of data. The iPod is all around us. Just about every household has one in some form or another.

It didn't take folks long to begin to understand that this machine, initially produced to sell music, could also be used for a lot of other cool things. Now, with the release of the iPod Touch, the content market has exploded. Not only can a user listen to music and watch feature length movies, they can view pictures, surf the Web, check email, and use all kinds of Web 2.0 applications that are rolling out every day.

I know a technology has hit the mainstream when I get daily phone calls from faculty requesting help implementing it in their course materials. Podcasting is here! The issue I'm facing is that many faculty like the idea of being able to say they have a podcast, but many don't truly understand what a podcast is and how it should be used.

Many of the requests I receive start as a request for a podcast but end up being delivered in a different format. Somewhere in the not to distant past, people became confused by what it is to deploy a simple audio file versus delivering a podcast.

A podcast is an audio file that is saved in a specific way and paired with some code that broadcasts not only a specific podcast episode but any subsequent episodes that you add to your list. This is the same idea as a blog. Podcasting takes advantage of the same RSS feeds that blogs employ. What you are doing is syndicating your audio in a podcast as opposed to the written word in a blog. Whether you are delivering an audio episode or a written installment, podcasting/blogging assumes that there will be a somewhat steady flow of content from the publisher.

Instructors want to use podcasting, but many of them don't need podcasting to accomplish their goals. There is a strong misconception that if they have an audio file, it needs to be set up in a podcast. If what they have is a single file, or a group of files that once published are complete, podcasting is not the best avenue. Remember podcasting assumes a continued effort by the publisher to produce materials on a somewhat regular basis. If the files that need to be uploaded are a one and done scenario, then creating small mp3 files or flash audio files will work just fine.

Before you prepare your audio for deployment, stop and think about what the goal of posting this information is. Are you going to continue to add to it? Are there a finite number of files? Are you, as the publisher, willing to continue to contribute to a long-running publishing schedule? Answering these three questions is all it takes to help determine whether you should go down the road of starting a podcast or find server space to host audio files that support your course content. In the end, the decision to include audio in a course will give students the opportunity to learn in a way that's different than typical lecture and writing. You'll be glad you did it, and it will help the student.