Podcasting and the University
The University of California at Berkeley has joined iTunes’ iUniversity and posted the lectures of many classes on the Internet. RSS feed enables users to subscribe to the podcasts of their course.
To explore what this venture into iUniversity meant, I browsed the Berkeley selections and grabbed the first lecture about a topic not familiar to me but of some interest. I listened to about the first ten minutes of the lecture. Many of the hesitations, the jumping from topic to topic are hallmarks of a face-to-face lecture environment. I wasn’t engaged enough to keep listening. The whole setup for access seemed very convenient. If I were a student, I’d subscribe to this course, hook up my iPod on a weekly basis and download Brashere’s lectures. If I were taking the course for credit, I’d listen away, no matter how tedious and uncompressed his ideas and comments were.
However, as a discerning listener, someone with very little time to waste listening to blathering, I quit and began to ponder what makes a podcast to which I will listen.
Today I came across an article from
TechLearning called “Professional Development as Podcast.” Certainly the concepts of just-in-time learning, focused on precisely what the instructor needs at that moment, and of honoring the busy lives of teachers and creating professional development that they can enter into their own schedule are noble concepts.
The authors get to the real point very quickly. “Attention must be paid to content. This critical element seems to be missing in many informal podcases, and perhaps this is why many universities experimenting with podcasting simply record lectures, missing the bulk of the technology’s potential.”
Here, here!! Three cheers!!
What, then, do I need to keep me engaged and learning on my own?
• Content that meets my interests: currently music and art
• An engaging lecturer who packs the lecture with synthesized knowledge and entertaining delivery. When learning about great music, I need to hear it, sometimes over and over again so I can “understand” the concepts. When watching a DVD about great art, I want to see a high resolution close-up of the work of art, then match it to another so that I can begin to discriminate between styles. Benchmark for me.
• Short enough or chaptered in such a way that I can grab five minutes here or there and not lose the flow
If I were teaching an advanced class in poetic analysis, for example, I’d read key poems and then add thought questions to the end. Students would listen ahead of class and come ready to engage in high level discourse with me. Part way through the course, I would ask them to identify a poem, analyze it, read it as a podcast and explicate the poem after its reading. The class would critique these podcasts and the best would become part of the developing knowledge base of the course.
Opening the Peer Review Conversation
Peer review was simply not done when I was a secondary school English teacher. When that classroom door closed, we were each the sole ruler of the domain within. Many of us were friends outside the classroom. Department chairs came in, with plenty of advance warning, observed us for a 55 minute period, checked off items on their “objective” checklist and so crafted an evaluation which had little impact on our teaching.
I know good teaching when I see it. I know effective instruction when I experience it. With the educational profession under deepening scrutiny, it is imperative that we enhance the process of instructor evaluation. How, then, can we do that?
How can we move a department at a college or university toward a collaborative effort to improve teaching with peer review as one primary component? At a research university, the instructors in many cases hold doctorate degrees and win grants. They research and publish so they will not perish. But they may be remarkably ineffective in the undergraduate classroom and that is a shame.
Let’s consider an ideal scenario. A small department has taken on the task of crafting a peer review process that honors the integrity of the profession and moves the quality of teaching forward in a significant way.
I’d begin by opening a conversation with the group. I’d start by asking, “What happens in a dynamic, effective classroom?” We’d describe that interaction, that climate, and those relationships. And from this detailed description, we might be able to create consensus on what characteristics of teaching a peer review should examine.
Here’s the characteristics I’d contribute to the discussion:
• Enthusiasm
• Eye contact with students
• Attempts to reduce the impersonality of higher education
• Clarity of voice
• Pacing of instruction
• Use of available technology
Those details could then be transformed into criteria. Evaluation criteria must be measurable. Many of the details would, nevertheless, be subjective. But teaching that changes a student’s world vision and self-perception always contains some additional magic. With the right leadership and expert facilitation, a group can move toward an understanding of peer review that can begin a transformation.
