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Despite the cheesy title there were plenty of visitors to ITG's podcasting table at the Yale Teaching Innovation Fair on April 13. We talked with graduate teaching fellows and professors about ideas for having students create podcasts and video podcasts (also called vodcasts) in their courses.

Podcasts are serialized audio broadcast that can be subscribed to and downloaded from the Internet. There are plenty of podcasts already available that could serve as interesting supplementary course material. We were excited, though, by the interest in student-created podcasts.

Creating a podcast necessitates higher order thinking the same way writing a paper does. For students to make a good academic podcast they will have to consult multiple sources, analyze the information, apply what they’ve found to meet the objectives of the assignment and then synthesize everything into a cogent narrative.

Additionally, authentic activities are motivating for students. When students know their work is going to have an audience and is part of a larger series of work being done by the class, they are more likely to be engaged by the assignment.

Marvin Chun is a popular professor in the Psychology Department. So popular, in fact, that students have created a “Marvin Chun is The Man!!!” fan group in Facebook. With that kind of reputation to live up to, Prof. Chun is eager to find new ways to help make his Introduction to Psychology lectures more engaging and interactive, a formidable task considering the class regularly draws over 300 students.

This semester, Prof. Chun has begun asking his students multiple-choice questions using a classroom response system (commonly referred to as clickers) that automatically and anonymously records and displays graphs of student responses.