16th June 2006

Advice for University podcasters

posted in podcasting |

I received a request for advice from someone at another university who wants to get some podcasting going, but is concerned about requiring iPods for all students. Rather than just email him back, I am posting my answer here in case this is of interest / value to others.

First, there is not a need to require all students to buy iPods to take advantage of podcasts. Students can play and listen/view podcasts from any computer connected to the Internet, so that is important to understand from an accessibility standpoint. If your school already provides students with access to computer technology, they can access published podcast content. Of course if students do have an iPod or other mobile digital audio device, the can listen to podcast content UNCHAINED from a computer. This is the real power of podcasting: the ability to time and place shift your consumption of downloaded content.

iTunesU is a free, hosted service for universities from Apple that can provide an excellent way for students to access podcasts without the University having to spend money on extra servers or bandwidth. Apple obviously benefits by having students inside the iTunes application to get the podcast– and they hope students will also stay to purchase music and videos. If your university is interested in offering podcasts at an institutional level, then iTunesU is definitely worth checking out. Remember that both Windows and Macintosh computer users can access resources from iTunesU via iTunes, so you should not be excluding students except Linux users. I don’t think there is a way for Linux users to run iTunes, and iTunesU content is not (from what I understand) directly accessible from a web browser.

If an individual professor or group is wanting to get into podcasting, they can do that affordably using free tools like Audacity or Garageband and hosted server space somewhere at the university. The easiest way to create an RSS feed (that is subscribeable for students using iTunes or another podcatching program) is to make a del.icio.us tagged list. To track usage, burn that RSS feed with Feedburner and generate free statistics, which can be very helpful– in addition to finding out about subscribers, you can learn what type of aggregators your subscribers are using.

If tons of people subscribe to a podcast, it can start putting a very noticeable drain on the bandwidth available from the hosting server computer. Another option, instead of using a university server, is for the professor to pay around $75 per year for a custom domain name and webspace with a company like POWWEB, which is the hosting company I use.

On this day..

This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 12:06 am and is filed under podcasting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There are currently 2 responses to “Advice for University podcasters”

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  1. 1 On June 16th, 2006, Jim Cottrell said:

    I use Audacity(my students play with Audacity) with the plug-in that saves as MP3. An Iriver MP3 player and Audacity seems to be a servicable setup.

    I rummaged around the del.icio.us site, but didn’t see information on creating an RSS feed by creating a “tagged list.” I did see something about “tag bundles.” But I think this just groups tags for some reason.

    On the del.icio.us site, I did find the phrase, “RSS feeds are available on most pages within del.icio.us.” I also found, “The general format of RSS urls is:
    *Tag - del.icio.us/rss/tag/bananas
    *User/Tag combo - del.icio.us/rss/julian/science “

    I take this to mean that if you type something like this into your aggregator and you post a new URL to del.icio.us using this tag, that del.icio.us magically will create the URL, to “feed” the URL in your aggregator. (I really don’t even know how to talk about this stuff.) Can someone explain a bit?

    I must admit that much of the RSS stuff is still a mystery to me. I just struggle with Pluck and Juice to recieve blogs and podcasts. When these programs are not slowing my connection to a crawl. Feedburner anouncements and email notifications keep me following blogs and podcasts much more consistantly.

  2. 2 On June 18th, 2006, English Education Professor » Blog Archive » Advice for University Podcasters: Dude- You Don’t Need 30 Ipods! said:

    [...] Advice for University podcasters First, there is not a need to require all students to buy iPods to take advantage of podcasts. Students can play and listen/view podcasts from any computer connected to the Internet, so that is important to understand from an accessibility standpoint. If your school already provides students with access to computer technology, they can access published podcast content. Of course if students do have an iPod or other mobile digital audio device, the can listen to podcast content UNCHAINED from a computer. This is the real power of podcasting: the ability to time and place shift your consumption of downloaded content. [...]