Thought / Idea

Re-thinking the use of audio recordings (podcasts) in higher education

Imagine you are sitting in a lecture and you participate in a great lesson. Wouldn´t it be nice to have that audio recorded? But what to do with an 2 or 3 hours long audio file? It will be hard to find somebody who is willing to listen to it from the begining to the end. Did you know that you can make audio-files “read-able”? Maybe you have seen already chapters and other markers in podcasts on soundcloud or other places. Yes, there are standards out to do that. But those markers can be not only just text, they can be also links to websites or images. So out of an simple audio file you can do right now much more then just listen to it. Isn´t that a big chance for higher education? Today i recorded first time the lesson I had, of course i don´t expect my students to listen to those 3 hours again, (I guess it was already hard to stand once those 3 hours with me! 😉 ) but maybe some parts of it might be interesting for them. So i will add markers, links i used, additional content and share that with my students. But I want my students to get active and again, the web offers various possibilities for that. So they will be asked to give feedback to the audio file, to write comments and so on. At the end of this process I hope they got more familiar with the content of my lesson today, let´s see if it will work like this. – Stay tuned! 😉