Jan 5, 2019
In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was planning a class podcast for the first time. As I continue planning the course and the assignments, my own inexperience has led me to the following decisions.
1.Early in the semester, I’ll ask students to find a podcast they love and a podcast they dislike. In class, we’ll listen to snippets and discuss what works and what doesn’t work about each podcast.
2.This will allow us to create standards for our own course podcast. I have decided that this will be a pass/fail assignment (that is worth 15% of the overall grade). This will allow, hopefully, for episodes that meet the overall standards we agree on in order to pass.
3.We will also take a day as a class to record a first episode on Sherlock Holmes. I will lead the episode with content I’ve prepared, and we will troubleshoot software and play around with sound effects and editing as a class so that everyone has an idea of what to do. I should note that since this is my first time podcasting, we will be downloading free software to our phones and using that to create our work. If this goes well, I hope to apply for a grant with better recording equipment and software.
4. In order to ensure every podcast episode passes (i.e. sounds great and includes interesting, research-based content), we will have a single due date for all episodes 65% of the way through the semester. The class will listen to all eight podcasts, and we will then workshop them. This will allow students time to revise and re-record if necessary, or to beef up discussion in a certain area, or to fix sounds issues, etc.
5. I will establish a final due date for the podcast episodes which will be about 4 weeks before a different final project is due. However, I will permit students to continue revising their episode after that date until they can receive a pass.
I’m hoping that with these procedures in place, the end result will be interesting and well-done, and that people will want to listen! Pedagogically, I want the students to use the podcast assignment to display the research and analysis that they’ve done on their topics.