Podcasting…and now Coursecasting

You don't have to be in a lecture hall to learn - you just need an MP3 player

By David Taylor, Ed.D.

By now you have probably heard about podcasting. After all, it was chosen as word of the year in 2005 by the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary (runners- up included bird flu, persistent vegetative state, trans fat, and sudoku). They define it as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player." Podcasting allows just about anyone with a microphone, a computer, and some inexpensive software to become a radio broadcast producer and deejay personality.

Now, are you ready for... coursecasting? Ready or not, students at dozens of universities, including The University of Texas Medical School at Houston, are way ahead of you. Coursecasting is a spinoff on the podcast concept, but instead of news and opinion, the subject is education.

How does podcasting – or coursecasting – work? In simplest terms, you record a program on a computer, using special software that also compresses the audio into a file, then uploads it to a server – a Web site. Listeners find your program on the Web site, and with a few clicks, they download the program onto their MP3 players to play at their convenience. This distribution process is one that online music companies, like Napster and Podcasting…and now Coursecasting iTunes, have perfected over the last decade. Small wonder that available podcasts now number in the millions, and getting your podcast found and heard among all the babble is the real trick. Web sites like iPodder.org and Podcast.net provide directories based on subject matter and popularity, and Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store has a section on podcasts for quick download to their popular iPod player.

Once the domain of geeks and techie hobbyists, podcasting has rapidly entered the mainstream. Media organizations like NPR and all the commercial networks provide selected shows for download. Sports organizations like NASCAR, NBA, NFL, the Tour de France, and their fans have spawned thousands of podcasts in a marriage of blogging and talk radio. In the health science field, prestigious journals like Science, Nature, and The New England Journal of Medicine have weekly news summaries and even entire articles available for downloadable listening. Many healthcare institutions, such as Johns Hopkins and the Mayo Clinic, offer health education programming via podcasts.

Coursecasting is such a natural evolution of podcasting that Apple recently created iTunes U, where colleges and universities can post lectures. Copyright and security are obvious faculty concerns, but Apple has taken care of that. Faculty can choose whether to make the lectures available to everyone or restrict it to their own students.

The UT Medical School is far ahead of the game. "We've been recording and distributing video of all the medical school lectures for years," says Stephen Fath, Ph.D., head of the UTH Interactive Video Department. "So it's a piece of cake to make the audio part available online as a separate download."

What prompted him to start podcasting? In a word, it was the students. "We took a poll and got about 140 responses. Only one was negative." Considering the survey was from a single link on the Interactive Video department Web site, that's an overwhelming response from time-stressed medical students.

The convenience of the new communication channel was a major selling point. "We have a lot of students who commute or come in from far away. Listening to a lecture makes that four-hour drive to San Antonio much more productive," he adds.

Jon Steuernagle, a second-year UT medical student, agrees. "If you ride your bike to school, take the bus, or sit at a train stop for 15 minutes, it gives you a way to maximize your time, for school."

Doesn't he miss the visual part of the lecture – the slides, the visuals – and of course, the professor's presence? "When you're talking about supplementation, I think the audio is enough," says Steuernagle. "You've been to the lecture, you've seen the presentation, really it's akin to going back and re-reading the syllabus."