Podcast:  Pros and Cons

A podcast is a digital audio or video file or recording, usually part of a themed series that can be downloaded from a website to a media player or computer (Dictionary.com, 2016).  Instructors can incorporate podcast to enhance or vary their students’ class experience by either pre-recording lessons, recording live face-to-face instruction, finding relative podcast that expound on a lesson topic or assigning podcast creation to their students as part of a project.  By adopting the use of podcast and changing it from an entertainment tool to a learning tool, educators are also able to personalize and humanize e-Learning by including rich media components into online courses in order to engage students in an active, meaningful learning environment (Merhi, 2015).

There are both pros and cons to integrating podcast into college curriculum.  Podcast can work with the most basic internet connections and can be saved, transferred and retrieved on portable devices such as cell phones and MP3 players (King & Cox, 2011, p. 37).  Using podcast allows instructors to tap into different learning styles of the students by providing both audio and visual content. Podcast tend to break up the monotony of just reading.  It can also benefit students with hearing or attention deficits as they can play back the recording to review sections that may have been difficult for them to understand or follow during the actual lesson (King & Cox, 2011, p. 37).  If used correctly, podcast can benefit the instructor when used to reiterate normal problem areas that students generally run into.  The recorded lessons can minimize the time spent answering these questions by giving the student the flexibility to playback the recording as many times as they may need in order to further grasp the material. 

A con is the time it may take in order to prepare the podcast to include as a part of the lesson.  Another con is that you have to continually update the recordings as information may become obsolete.   Instructors must be able to find the happy medium when using podcast or they will not be well received by their students. 

Danella

King, K. P., & Cox, T. D. (Eds.). (2011). The professor's guide to taming technology:  Leveraging digital media, Web 2.0, and more for learning. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Merhi, M. I. (2015).  Factors influencing higher education students to adopt podcast:  An empirical study. Computers & Education, 83, 32-43.  Retrieved October 5, 2016, from http://www.sciencedirect.com.er.lib.k-state.edu/science/article/pii/S0360131514002917

podcast. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved October 5, 2016 from Dictionary.com website http://www.dictionary.com/browse/podcast