Okay, so naturally I think to myself, "can I really educate myself by listening to podcasts of lectures?"
Researchers Dani McKinney, Jennifer L. Dyck and Elise S. Luber, in the Department of Psychology at SUNY in Fredonia, NY, wondered the same thing. So they did a study. The title of their report is called, "iTunes University and the classroom: Can podcasts replace Professors?" Here's a link to that study (I'm not allowed to post the pdf on blogger.com):
www.fredonia.edu/department/psychology/pdf/CAE1263.pdf
McKinney, Dyck and Elise wanted to know the impact of exposure to subject matter via classroom lecture versus via podcast using a ipod or mp3 player. They divided college students into two groups. Both groups were given the same Powerpoint presentation, but one group received the accompanying lecture by the professor in the classroom, and the other group received the lecture via podcast on their ipod/mp3 player. One month later both groups were tested on the material. The podcast group performed significantly better.
Note taking played an important role in the transference of knowledge in this study. The lecture group were exposed to the classroom lecture once, and were allowed to take notes and interact with professors during that time. The podcast group did not have access to the professor to ask questions, but they could listen to the podcast as many times as they liked as they took notes. The study results showed that the ability to listen to the podcast multiple times combined with note taking increased the transference of knowledge. Students who did not take notes in either group did not receive high scores.
So, this study doesn't mean teachers will be replaced by podcasts, but it does show that providing student access to podcasts of lectures so that they can supplement their note taking will most likely increase the amount of the content they will learn.
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Yes I agree. Actually that's what we did when I was in college. We taped some of the difficult classes and uploaded them to our study website, so we could watch any part of them as many times as we wanted. It's amazing.
ReplyDeleteI wish more professors would do this. IDE632 Prof. Jerry Edmonds did this in my class. However, I didn't listen to more than one because there was a lot of dead space/silence in the lecture, and listening to 3 hours of lecture was VERY boring. But is was comforting to know that I COULD listen if I wanted to.
ReplyDeleteStacey, thanks for sharing a very interesting study! It seems that the advantage of ipod is that students can listen to it "multiple" times, which means, to benefit from podcasting, students need to listen to it multiple time. Then the question is: how realistic to expect students to listen to any lecture multiple times, especially if many lectures are podcasting?
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