Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I popped over to the U. of Minnesota today for a teleconference about podcasting in the classroom. Long-time readers may recall that I posted last year about the U.’s UThink blogging system that provides a free blog for every student and staff member. They’ve upgraded the system to support podcasting now and they will be tracking how the students and faculty take to it. More than 50 people showed up for this teleconference which suggests that there’s quite a bit of pent-up interest in the topic. The main portion of the teleconference is about Purdue’s campus-wide podcasting system called BoilerCast. The presenter is Michael Gay who was the main developer of the BoilerCast system.

The origin of BoilerCast goes back 35 years to a system of recording courses onto tape and making them available to students in the library. They decided to switch to digital recording back in 2002 and were planning to use the Real Networks system, but decided to put the project on hold in 2004. Podcasting emerged just in time and Michael decided that RSS and MP3 made the perfect combination to move the project forward.

Michael’s talking about the Duke iPod program and Stanford’s new custom iTunes music store and examples of other universities experimenting with digital audio content. Now we’re getting a general intro to podcasting, RSS, XML, podcatching software, etc. Nothing new there for most of you reading this. (If you’re new to podcasting, check out the Wikipedia article.)

Now on to the BoilerCast project. About 60 of 800 faculty members at Purdue are recording their lectures. Some courses work better than others in audio format, of course. Instructors get to decide if they want their podcasts to be available to everyone or just the students in their course. The BoilerCast system is so automated that instructors don’t need to do anything except show up for class and teach. The courses are recorded, encoded, tagged, uploaded, and published automatically within 10 minutes of the end of class with only a couple technical support people needed for the whole system.

Purdue had an existing telephone infrastructure that could be reconfigured to tap into the classroom sound systems. They added ceiling microphones to rooms that didn’t already have them. Over 60 rooms on campus are connected to the system. They use a bunch of centrally located Marantz recording decks (PMD-570) to encode to MP3 on the fly. They wrote some software to rename the files, edit the ID3 tags, update the feed, and update the Web page. They don’t automate the recording process. A person actually hits “record.”

Instructors who want to podcast their classes simply complete an online request form. Once the request has been submitted and confirmed, the recording operator sets up the course in the BoilerCast software with the course information (instructor name, course title, etc.). Once the session is recorded, the software kicks in and takes care of most everything else. The students can subscribe to each course’s RSS feed or download individual lectures manually. They also stream the lectures in Windows Media and Real format.

The instructors who are podcasting don’t think that making their courses available online has affected attendance in their courses. I imagine that professors who are concerned about that issue wouldn’t be interested in podcasting anyway. Purdue hasn’t done anything to address the issue of students being recorded during lectures. It hasn’t been a big issue at this point since the students’ voices are rarely heard anyway because of the microphone placement. So far, and this project has been available for less than a semester, about 50% of the hits to the RSS feeds are coming from on campus. Work is underway now to make the BoilerCast feeds more accessible for students who are disabled.

Some stats:

• 35 courses set up initially
• 1080 downloads in the first week
• 70 courses currently offered
• 116,500 total downloads at this point
• 43% of the hits are from iTunes
• 41% own or are planning to buy an iPod

There’s quite a bit of interest in video at this point. Michael expects that the new iPod will drive the demand further.

Finally, Shane Nackerud from the U.’s UThink project talked a bit about the recent MovableType upgrade that has brought podcasting to students and staff at the U. of Minnesota. Just like this blog that uses Wordpress, MovableType makes podcasting transparent. You merely need to upload the digital file and MovableType creates the RSS 2.0 enclosure elements automatically. UThink has a 15-MB per file upload limit right now, but they’re considering increasing that to accommodate longer podcasts.

That’s it for the conference. Cool stuff. I think I’m going to have to ask Shane if he’s like to be a guest my podcast.