There is a lot of academic material available as downloadable podcasts on the web these days including whole courses from elite universities. Would be interested to see if there is much analysis on this e.g why do people put such material up; does it benefit people who use it in the same way formal education does; does it reduce the premia to going to top places etc.,
UCD has started its own one which looks like it will be good.
"Welcome to UCDscholarcast
This website is dedicated to the publication of quality academic scholarship in audio download format. UCDscholarcast provides downloadable lectures, recorded to the highest broadcast standards to a wide academic audience of scholars, graduate students, undergraduates and interested others. Each scholarcast is accompanied by a downloadable pdf text version of the lecture to facilitate citation of scholarcast content in written academic work."
http://www.ucd.ie/scholarcast/index.html
3 comments:
The whole concept of the podcast is educationally useful if the students can access, download, and remix the podcasts as they like. The UCD version seems quite audio heavy, with a transcript rather than video or slides. It's a good first go, but more needs to be done---MIT and Berkley are already giving away huge swathes of lecture content online, for example, MIT's mathematics lectures for an entire year are online:http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/
The whole concept of the podcast is educationally useful if the students can access, download, and remix the podcasts as they like. The UCD version seems quite audio heavy, with a transcript rather than video or slides. It's a good first go, but more needs to be done---MIT and Berkley are already giving away huge swathes of lecture content online, for example, MIT's mathematics lectures for an entire year are online:http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/
UCDscholarcast is a forum for publishing academic research in audio format--it is the audio equivalent of a scholarly journal. It is not a Teaching and Learning initiative although it may have a contribution to make in this area.
I'm sure more inventive and student-friendly things could be done with a purely T&L project.
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