Friday, April 11, 2008

Death of the Podcast

As a supplement to my lectures and notes for 2006-7, I decided to begin making some specific MP3 recordings at certain strategic points during the delivery, which resulted in about four or five recordings with each lasting somewhere between 3 to 4 minutes per session. While I used the MP3’s in audio form, I also decided to tryout driving an avatar with the audio and so give them all something to look at while listening, basically duplicating the material. All these recordings I then posted onto Moodle. At the time my students thought this was a bit of a novelty, and by tracking their activity I found they seemed to be making good use of them, very encouraging for me. At the start of this academic year, I simply restored my course and released the MP3 and Video casts, great for me, and I thought my students, however tracking has revealed an unexpected trend for the first semester. Below I have listed the students access, from a group of 20+ on a topic basis for the material

MP3 11,6,6,0,1
Video 9,4,3,0,4

As an experiment I have not installed the Podcasts for the second semester, and I have to say so far have received no requests for them! Has anyone else out there had a similar experience? Was the podcast just a blip? Or is this a reflection of my present cohort?

1 Comments:

Blogger Achilles said...

I spent one christmas holiday doing audio versions of my main moodle coutses to support dyslexic students (I teach KS3/KS4) initialy they used them but without prompting they returned to not being able to follow text rather than audio which they could use. Bizzarly audio needs to be visual, perhaps your use of avatars suggests that even that is not enough on its own.

7:35 PM  

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