In keeping with our desire to help support remote and hybrid learning, today's session will focus on podcasting at a distance. We will discuss various platforms that both you and students can utilize, ways to incorporate podcasting into your classes or departments, and hear from other colleagues who have successfully implemented podcasting into their classes.

Why Podcasts? Podcasting can be a creative assignment that encourages students to engage with a topic aurally and orally in addition to simply via text. By engaging the senses more deeply, students gain a more comprehensive understanding of the topic.

The conversational, journalistic style that many podcasts use encourages students to think outside the box in terms of presentation. Radio services like NPR and the BBC have many good examples of engaging, informative programming in their podcasts. With the current surge in popularity of podcasting as a medium for entertainment and information, students are likely to already have podcasts that they enjoy, which they can try to emulate as they complete their own projects.

A few Podcasts created by Transylvanians:

• Discovering Darwin - Podcasts created by TU biology faculty, James Wagner, Sarah Bray, & Josh Adkins.
• TU Writing for Writing's Sake 2018 - Podcasts of participants of the class WRC-2343 taught by Scott Whiddon
• Pantsuit Politics - Sarah Stewart Holland '03 and Beth Silvers '03

On Teaching with Podcasts:

• Media ecology education: Podcasts as multimodal demonstrations of learning
• Creative Assignments: Podcasting

• Simple Approach-- just record a zoom conversation as an audio podcast or video podcast. Zoom creates both audio (file_name.m4a) and video (file_name.mp4) files of recorded conversations.
• Multitrack Podcasting in Zoom-- zoom can be set to record each speaker's audio into a separate audio file. This makes editing much easier, for example to remove a cough or to increase the volume of a single voice that is too quiet.

Zecncastr has a free Hobbyist option for recording podcasts at a distance. It currently allows unlimited guests and recording time. It only works with computers running Firefox or Chrome browsers. Each voice is recorded into a separate mp3 audio file.

Be sure all podcast recording session participants use headphones or earbuds to prevent feedback.

Experienced remote podcasters might consider using a Double Ender setup where each user also records audio locally in addition to the Zoom, Zencastr, or other network recording platform. For a double ender, both you and your guest record each end of the audio locally. After the interview, your guest sends you their audio file and the two ends of the conversation are stitched together in post-production editing. This is the gold standard in terms of audio quality. By recording locally rather than over the internet, it prevents audio compression and stops connectivity issues affecting your interview.

A recorded podcast usually needs to be edited. Clean it up by removing unnecessary parts of the conversation, balancing voice volumes, and, if appropriate, add legal music, or produce your own music.

There are many free editing tools for podcasts:

• Audacity: Audacity Editing Tips
• Bandlab: Bandlab Editing Tips
• Garage Band (Mac only): Garage Band Editing Tips
• Adobe Audition (Not free): Adobe Audition Editing Tips

Publishing and sharing podcasts: Soundcloud is good place for students to publish and share podcasts, but there are many other ways to do it, such as linking to audio in a google site.

For more information and help with podcasts and other digital projects, please reach out to the DLA team. We can arrange for training sessions for faculty, students, and staff, including one-on-one peer tutoring.

Many thanks to the DLA work-study crew for their work on researching, testing, and compiling these resources: Katie Dienhart, Cait Druck, John Payne, & Astrid Trucks!