Week 14 Podcasting and Webcasting

Our TA Shuya brought up a very insightful question in the class. Will the popularity of shared online videos cause podcasts to obsolesce? To answer this question, I think we’d better analyze the pros and cons of each of these two media.

Media	Podcast	Online Shared Video
Pros	Require less effort on recording and editing Take less time for upload and download Take up smaller saving space Can be prescribed (automatically download) Can be listened while driving Transcript are usually offered Transcript can be edited in a word spreadsheet	Catch attention quickly More engaging Good at explaining complex and abstruse concepts Some have subtitles Wildly shared in blogs, Facebook, Twitter and many other Web 2.0 platforms
Cons	Some podcasts lack of editing Listeners easily get bored Hard to explain complex and abstruse concepts	Require more effort on recording and editing Take more time to upload and download (some are not allowed to download) Take up larger saving space Cannot be watched while driving Subtitle cannot be edited

The above compare and contrast informs us both media have advantages and disadvantages. The advantages explain the existing of each of media, while the disadvantages ask for the existing of the other. (Note: here the number of pros and cons cannot lead to a conclusion as which one is better, which is worse, because this is not a quantitative analysis, and I might lose some important points.) What conclusion we can make here is podcast will keep benefiting learning if we can appropriately apply it based on our understanding of its pros and cons.

The other topic of this week is webcast. I read the article, College 2.0: More Professors Could Share Lectures Online.But Should They?, which presents how professors from two camps are wrestling on the issue of videotaping and webcasting classes.

It may be helpful for considering this issue if we list those opposite propositions in another table.

Share Lectures Online

Not Share Lectures Online

Coursecasting equipments are ready or getting ready. Equalize access to high quality education Student would get an earlier and better sense of what they want to major. Help students preview and review classes. Students involve more in the class because professors offer quizzes, take attendance and showing up part of the grade to avoid skipping class. Professors watch other’s course videos in order to improve teaching. Professors play past recordings and focus more on organizing discussion and group projects.

Some professors are “camera shy”. Professors would face mockery. Classroom is a “sacred space” that may need to stay private to preserve academic freedom. Give away too much educational content Need time and effort to manage the recording process Students may skip class or choose home schooling at the college level. Copyright and intellectual property issues Student privacy needs to be protected.

Whether we should webcast courses to the public seems to be a more controversial issue. It involves various personal, cultural, technology and policy factors. However, as an advocator of OER, I propose that if all or most needed factors are available, we should do our best to open access to the corse.