Introducing Podcasts to the Educational Palette of a Dual-Mode Course

Distance students can suffer from feelings of isolation, which can result in dropouts from lack of motivation to continue the course. Previous studies have shown that the use of pod casts can help reduce this feeling of isolation. Pod casts can also help make studies more flexible, which can aid students with a busy schedule. To evaluate pod casts in distance higher education, we provided the students with four types of pod casts: Lecture Casts, Tutorial Casts, Review Casts and Extra Casts. We produced 54 pod casts during the course. The students perceived all of the types of pod casts helpful, but preferred the Tutorial Casts. These focused on solving actual problems, and the students said that they learned a lot by these. We found that it takes a lot of resources to produce good pod casts and any attempt to introduce them should be budgeted accordingly. We also found that there are still several technical challenges to overcome, from local infrastructure to subscriptions models and device compatibility.