Podcast+Script

Recently, my colleagues and I embarked on a redesign of our corporate university. As part of that redesign, we discussed our company's plans for expansion and how that will increase the knowledge burden on our students. I conveyed to them the concepts around the Connectivism learning theory, which describes how the increase in knowledge has forced us to create networks, both social and technological, to connect us to the knowledge that we need for our everyday lives. The rate of this increase has made it nearly impossible for the average person to stay abreast of the changes, so we have had to change our tactic to one of knowing resources, rather than knowing knowledge.

In that light, we discussed how to help our students build those social and technological networks. One of our conclusions was that we needed stronger support for our student's learning styles. We decided to focus on aural learners, and adding audio recordings to our lessons and our follow-up newsletters. In this podcast, I want to demonstrate how a podcast is a superior method for adding audio to our university, over some of the other machine-generated techniques that we discussed. To begin, let's define a podcast as an audio file that can be played directly from a website, downloaded and played on an MP3 player or on a computer. This flexibility allows the student to use the podcast in the way they find most comfortable.

One of the greatest benefits that I see with a podcast is that it can be played anytime, anywhere. The learner is not tied to his computer. If he wishes to review lessons, or our newsletters, while he is traveling to a job site, he can do so. Perhaps a kinesthetic learner would use a podcast as a tutorial while working on a particularly difficult service call, where he can apply what he is hearing in a hands-on manner.

The other great benefit I see with podcasts is that it is easy to create high quality audio from our computers. I was recently introduced to a website called //Podomatic//, which stepped me through creating a podcast with my computer's microphone. It took about 3 minutes (plus the recording time) to create the podcast. For me, a human voice creates a strong connection between the student and the facilitator; I'm concerned that using a machine-generated voice with all of our lessons will send a message to our students that we aren't interested in actually helping them learn. Additionally, the machine-generated voices require coaching to create realistic sounds for words that are not contained in their lexicon.

Podcasts also offer us another avenue for communicating with our learners after they complete their formal training. A defining characteristic of podcasts is that they can be episodic, and pushed to learners via an RSS feed. An RSS feed delivers the podcast to the learner when they subscribe to the podcast. Again, this supports the anytime, anywhere learning that I feel will benefit our students as our company completes its expansion plans. As we build a library of podcasts, our students will come to know that they can depend on it as a resource for the knowledge they need to perform their jobs successfully.

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