One of my general frustrations with the individuals I consider the movers and shakers in the educ blog community is that they seldom collect or rely on research and data. Innovators trained in the tradition I come from have vision and beliefs just like anyone else, but we start to feel guilty when we promote practices without the benefit of some form of evidence. I hope this “built-in” guilt mechanism is a hedge against becoming too caught up in the thrill of being a promoter.
I decided when there was a connection to the general themes of this blog I would make an effort to share data I collect. Here is a simple finding that may be relevent to those interested in podcasting educational content.
A topic I study as a researcher is the impact of providing beginning college students “lecture supplements.” I consider such questions as –
- Will students make voluntary use of lecture supplements?
- What are the characteristics of students who use lecture supplements?
- Is there a connection between the use of lecture supplements and attendance?
- Etc.
I have been evaluating student use of lecture outlines (available before lectures) and lecture summaries for some time. For the past couple of years, I have added audio.
The following chart (a picture about student use of lecture resources – several thousand words) indicates the % of outlines, summaries, and audio files (from left to right) “downloaded” by students.
An impression – within the context of text-based resources, students are not that interested in audio content. Why – I am guessing the efficiency of lecture summaries is much greater and lecture summaries prepared by a qualified individual have been “preprocessed” and are more helpful as a supplement.
So – I still think there may be some specific opportunities for “podcast” content, but the DATA I have regarding represenations of entire lectures suggest that college students would prefer a quality text summary. When students are investing their time, students appear to prefer well written and complete information summaries. I am assuming there would be specific exceptions that would involve the unique capabilities of audio – language development, music, bird calls, etc. Perhaps a collaborative set of master notes generates by students via a wiki should be the focus of our attention.
