One of the things I set out to do this year is to provide podcasts to support my students.

Rather than simply make the lectures available (an easy option), I have decided to create an extra weekly podcast to support reading and lecture preparation. My reason is that I know that my students can make sense of the journal articles I give them to read, but are less good at managing time and (importantly) integrating them. My podcasts therefore address these issues by directing reading, suggesting order of reading, areas to focus on, etc.

My first attempt took about 4 hours to produce, split between production time and preparation time. The preparation time duplicates as lecture preparation time. An extra two hours of preparation time seems a lot for a ten minute podcast so I need to develop my workflow a bit more and also monitor the use by the students before deciding if I will continue next year. Although each podcast is only about 10 minutes long, they support many hours of student work.

I had a number of small issues that added considerably to the time (on top of preparation). The first problem was that I did not record the podcast at a loud enough volume. I also created a file too large for the university system so had to compress it at work which lowered the volume further. The file size constraint has been lifted and the second recording has been much louder, so these have been addressed.

Apple’s Garage Band on my Mac at home is my only choice to produce the podcasts — there is far too much noise from the window and walls in the office to it feasible to do at work. A lot of time is spent editing out half finished sentences, stutters and the like. While these are acceptable in a live setting, they do not seem appropriate on a recording. Hopefully with practice this editing will become quicker and needed less.

I have not bothered with fancy sound effects. I have experimented with url links to article in sync with my commentary. However, they don’t seem to export reliably so I will dispense with them.

Having got to terms with the basics of the audio, adding video seems like the logical next step (for audio and visual cues for learning). So, some experiments with the production of annotated slide shows where lecture slides will be in sync with the audio. In theory on the Mac this is easy because Keynote has the facility to record and play the slides at the same time. At the end of a lecture this can be saved to a QuickTime file and shared. However, my lecture theatre doesn’t have sound out at the lectern so there is no easy way to get good quality audio into my Mac. My solution is to record the audio with a boundary microphone and also record audio from a lapel microphone and digital recorder. In theory I can relatively easily then combine the two sets of audio files in sync with the video exported for Keynote.

Alas, its not that simple. Keynote doesn’t seem to export the audio properly so I need to pull the video and audio files into iMovie then add everything together. Some sound processing to make it more easier on the ear is then needed in Garage Band. Unfortunately, this all means that the video then is proper video rather than a series of synchronised JPEGs and an audio track. The result is a huge file and a couple of hours of faffing around on the computer. I’ll continue to experiment a little in my spare time, but the additional value is not at this stage worth the effort. It might be, for example, if I was involved with distance education, for example.

Meanwhile, some of my dinner time experimenting on the last issue is nearly finished exporting, so I’ll check that and get back to sorting things for the lecture tomorrow.