The Podcast as an Essay Alternative

A response to the It’s Alive! Activity
created by Jen Booth (@jen.booth)

Number of views: 130

I’ve been struggling to figure out how to give students more choice in the dreaded essay assignment for my course. Through the extend modules, I’ve been developing the idea of offering a podcast (with script) as an alternate (and perhaps more appealing) way for students to demonstrate their academic research, writing, source integration and other skills. I prefer to let students do the work and then ask for permission to keep and show other students their exemplary work in future semesters, so I don’t really want to record a podcast myself. However, my course is very much geared towards “the essay” and some students just cannot reconcile themselves to this task; they simply don’t see the value. So, the Podcast becomes the technology-enabled answer to this challenge.

In lieu of a prototype, I decided that the most useful thing for me to do (short of writing a script and recording the podcast myself – and there is far too much of me talking in this course already), was to start to prepare at least some basic podcast-focused resources. So, in the It’s alive activity, you’ll see a first attempt at taking the information from an annotated bibliography (that I wrote long ago) and plotting it out into a podcast outline. This still needs some work. I want it to represent student work until such time as I have some exemplars I can use for demonstration, so you’ll notice that it’s not perfect.   The next step in this journey will be to take the outline and try to map it out into more of a script, with approximate timings and an indication of how I’ll integrate sources into the podcast, etc.   However, for the purposes of this It’s alive assignment, I’m going with the Podcast Outline, and I will build on this in my course prep as the weeks go on.

As for steps taken to get here, I have done a lot of back and forth with myself – can a podcast represent the same types of things as an essay? (mostly, yes, if it has a script). How will I adapt my essay focused content to permit a different output format (an H5P branching scenario came out of this discussion with myself, as part of the experimenter module) and so on.

To implement, I’ll be adding this to my course as a example (right now I only have essay outlines) and will hope to dedicate some time to turning it into a script to show students what that might look like. As the semesters go on, I will likely replace this effort with some real student work – because I suspect that those who are motivated to create a podcast are going to do a much better job than I am (honestly, I like essays!).