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Welcome to Faculty Success Higher Ed Conversations Podcast Series.

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Hi, I'm Theresa, Valais, Instructional Designer with the Faculty Academic Center of Excellence at Towson University.

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The purpose of the faculty success Higher Ed Conversations podcast is to engage faculty in

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conversations to support professional growth with the aim of enhancing faculty and students success.

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We're here today with Samuel Clevenger, assistant professor in the Department of kinesiology at Tauzin,

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his research and teaching interest center on the history of sport and physical culture,

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along with the uses of podcasting and digital audio within research in sport.

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He received his Ph.D. in physical cultural studies from the University of Maryland.

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His research has been published in international journals, including Rethinking History,

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Sport and Society and the International Journal of the History of Sport.

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It's a pleasure to have you with us today, Sam, for our inaugural podcast on teaching and learning through podcasts.

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Welcome. Hi, Teresa. Thanks for having me. Well, thanks for being here.

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So, Sam, we met through the facet online workshop for to you faculty this summer.

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Yeah. And your workshop introduction, you mentioned you use podcasts for course content.

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We're curious to learn more about what inspired you to use this medium in class and

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whether you are producing your own podcast content or tapping into other podcast sources.

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Or also anxious to learn about your experience teaching with podcasts as well

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as a little about what your students say about learning through podcasts.

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How does this sound to you? Sounds great. Love to talk about those things.

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Can you tell us a little bit about what is podcasting?

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I think like a podcast is basically a digital file that's available to download on the Internet.

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Usually it's an audio file, which means it's not it's not video.

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It's not usually written down, although sometimes there's transcripts on the website.

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It's just an audio file that someone can download and listen to on the computer on their mobile device,

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usually on a cell phone or something, they tend to be freely available.

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So there is usually a distribution website like Apple Podcasts or Stitcher or

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Google Podcasts where you can download and listen to the podcast for free.

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Although increasingly, podcasts are you're. There are podcasts where there's a paywall where you have to pay to listen to them.

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Now, you also sometimes will find people that will talk about video podcasts,

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but usually when someone uses the term podcast, what they mean is something that's audio.

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Only someone's just listening to it. And they usually are interview based that kind of like what we're doing right here.

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So people are talking about a topic usually about maybe a current event or a story or some sort

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of kind of digital audio production involving people talking with one another about something.

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What I think is interesting about podcasting right now is that they are increasingly

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popular and there are some that have talked about kind of the golden age of podcasting,

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especially around the 20 tens with productions like Serial or This American Life or Radiolab.

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A lot of these public radio podcasts that have gotten quite popular during their time and nowadays,

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I think in a recent statistic that I saw on the Internet,

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it's something around like 41% of the population in the United States at least has listened to podcasts and are listening to them on a monthly basis.

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So in terms of the number of people listening, that's 117 million listeners, which means in terms of undergraduate education,

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there's probably a huge number of students who are listening to podcasts on a regular basis as well,

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probably for for personal reasons, for personal enjoyment and sports or some sort of popular culture thing that they're into.

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Yeah, that's a great observation, Sam. Thanks for sharing that.

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There's a large percentage of consumers. Yeah. Yeah, there are.

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You know, I know just from talking with students in my my classrooms, that there are a large percentage of students that are listening to podcasts.

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Usually for me, because I teach sport history at sports podcast.

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But those also in terms of teaching podcasts, even up to this point, I don't think are necessarily something that you hear a lot about.

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You know, a lot of my classes, it's very kind of writing and reading based.

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So it's still kind of an area of, I guess, growth in terms of education, in terms of, you know,

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different ideas of trying to access and communicate with students because I think a lot of them are already listening to podcasts.

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Mm hmm. Well, that brings us to the next question. Can you tell us about what inspired you to consider podcasting for teaching and learning?

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You know, a lot of it has to do, I think, with my own personal interests in music and audio.

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So when I was younger in high school and in college, I was I was in bands I was in, I guess if you call them rock bands, you know,

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not playing the tuba for in school, but, you know, playing guitar outside of school and, you know, playing shows when I was in college.

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So when I. I went to graduate school and began my academic career.

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I was really interested in finding ways to kind of mesh my interests in music.

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An idea with now a career in research and teaching,

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and the ways in which music and audio can actually augment or even kind of diversify and expand the ways that I'm doing both research and teaching.

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And that's combined with, you know, I've I've been teaching for probably around five years or so now and including graduate school.

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And I have had kind of a growing, I guess, dissatisfaction with writing based assessments just personally.

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And I think part of that is because I've I've had a decent amount of experience now of students who, you know,

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they come to you and they they talk about how they have kind of trouble, kind of articulating their ideas through a written or a formal essay format.

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And, you know, it gets kind of frustrating.

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To try to figure out different modes of assessments are different ways for them to articulate their knowledge or what they're learning.

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That doesn't necessarily have to involve sitting down at a computer and trying to type it out in an essay format.

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So because of that, I started to look more readily at things like podcasts and think about how those could be incorporated into a classroom.

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And then also there's also that led to me becoming more interested in literature and scholarship is being published in fields like sound studies,

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down studies, and even within recent years, podcast studies, there's its own kind of burgeoning field in of itself,

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that's of various scholars and researchers that are talking constantly about the benefits of podcasting in the classroom and,

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you know, critically discussing podcasting,

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podcasting productions, podcasting formats and other, you know,

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other sort of theoretical and philosophical understandings of sound itself, sound studies.

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It is a much even larger field than podcast studies.

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And what I really like, what I think is really fascinating about a lot of sound studies scholarship is the way that

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they discuss sound as something that's distinct from a kind of written or visual format,

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at least in certain important ways.

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Like, for instance, when you think about sound, I, I'm trying to remember the author who wrote about this, but they talked about how with sound,

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the listener is literally sharing time and space with that sound object because the sound is literally in their ears.

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It's in them. They're feeling and hearing internal.

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Right. Right. So unlike watching a documentary or reading a book where the object is outside the person,

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the sound is literally with them, they're like experiencing it almost bodily.

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So in that sense, I there are, there are many different researchers who talk about kind of the creative or imaginative dimensions of that,

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of how that can sort of expand,

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at least if we're talking about student specifically expand the ways that they're thinking about the world around them,

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how they understand the world, the meaning of things in ways that seem distinctive from the written or visual format.

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So I'm not necessarily saying one is better than the other,

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but it seems alternative and different mode of them articulating what they're thinking and what they're learning about the world.

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And when I when I read that, that seems really that seems really exciting.

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It's it's it's a real fascinating idea.

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This idea that, you know, sound is something that's not sort of an object outside of the student, but with them,

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I think that could really open up some really interesting possibilities in terms

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of assignments and in terms of assessments that we can do in the classroom.

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You know, I know from personal experience in my classes when I play a podcast,

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the dynamic for students is quite different from watching a documentary.

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And you know, there's only been a year or two where I've really pushed to incorporate podcasts in my classes,

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but it does seem like the dynamic is has improved or seems better in certain respects.

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It does seem like they almost kind of acquire more.

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They thought more about the information from the podcast as opposed to when I've shown them a documentary.

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So it's really, really fascinating, fascinating stuff. So thank you for pointing out that sound distinctly moves the body in unique ways.

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You know, your commentary brought me back to the years I spent teaching listening for academic purposes for second language learners in higher ed.

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Back then, I was using what would be called a podcast today.

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So they it was a text with the academic topics and re prerecorded audio from NPR, All Things Considered.

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Okay. Yeah. So you know, the value that it brought to students and to use your words,

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conjure images in their mind when listening is really important and an effective way to actually construct meaning.

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Right. And so, you know, in particular, in the field of language learning, writing, communication.

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Right. You know, that actually helps support language development when you're actually going through the

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listening component and and really having to work with constructing those images in your mind.

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So I just wanted to point that out. And in turn,

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what I found was that the practice in listening strengthens their language acquisition as well as their productive skills of speaking and listening.

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Excuse me, speaking and writing. So you'll see, you know, they it's not it's not a one or the other.

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I think when you talk about podcasts, you're thinking of an end.

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Yes. Yes, exactly. Kind of expanding.

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Yeah. Yeah. So let's shift now to hear ways you've incorporated podcasts into your courses.

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You know, there is a there's a wealth of really great podcasts available from public radio,

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either from NPR or I'm thinking like PR X or a lot of the productions that have been on the radio there's and there's

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such a wealth of series that are available that are very rigorous and can be easily incorporated in the classroom.

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You know, I, I come from a historical background, so I'm thinking in terms of history podcast,

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but there's one I think that's connected with, I think it's either Duke University or the University of North Carolina.

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I think it's Duke University, but it's called Seen on Radio. And they do these wonderful series about various very critical historical topics.

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And I know the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities has a podcast called Back Story,

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where I think it's sometimes every week at least they have a very different historical topic that's relevant to current events.

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So whatever sort of current event is going on or one current event,

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they sort of dig into the past to try to get some historical context and they talk to professors and researchers who have expertize on

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those various topics and through Lyneham that was the other one I was thinking through line is another historical podcast that NPR does,

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and those are just the historical podcast.

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There's, there's a wealth of other podcasts that deal with other fields like sociology or the gender studies and, and science.

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There's an enormous amount of various different science and health and medicine podcasts that I think could be extremely useful within the classroom.

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I myself, in a class about women's sports history, you know, I've, for example,

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I can think of a podcast that the I believe it's a public radio station in Boston or has this great podcast episode about

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or Washington who is one of the first African-American female sports stars in American history in the early 20th century.

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And I've used that multiple times in classes,

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in part because there's a there's there's a there's a few things that have been written about Oprah Washington now,

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but there's not really kind of a good documentary or good YouTube clip.

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But there's this wonderful podcast. It's about 15 or 20 minutes or so.

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It's a great break in the classroom for students.

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And so I've used that multiple times now to kind of elicit discussion about both Washington's experience and,

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you know, talk about issues about race and racism in sport history.

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It's been great. Increasingly, increasingly, I want to incorporate more incorporate more podcasts in my classroom as I mean,

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right now, most of the time, the podcasts are has supplement supplementary materials.

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So I still have an assigned reading and I still have mostly assessments that are writing based or perhaps presentation based.

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And one of my goals personally in terms of being an instructor would be to more incorporate more this idea of a podcast as an assessment,

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not necessarily sort of being the only mode of assessment,

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but being, like you said before, and, and,

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and another mode that the students can choose in addition to writing or in addition to perhaps some sort of video production.

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So more and incorporating the podcast in that way as sort of an additional mode of assessment that

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students can choose from when they're trying to demonstrate their knowledge of topics in the class.

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I mean, most of the time with the podcasting, there's probably still going to be less formal requirements,

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you know, sources and references and things like that.

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But there's something really kind of artistic and creative in podcasting.

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And I think to allow students to be able to tap in that more effectively as

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something that's in addition to traditional written or visual modes or assessments,

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I think would be really, really useful. So that's one of my objectives for my classes.

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Over 20 years ago when I was in school getting my master's in teaching, I'll never forget what the assessment professor said.

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And she said, give your students multiple ways to show you what they know.

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Right. And so I think that fits hand-in-glove with what you've just said, Sam.

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Right. Plus, I was thinking students, you know, they have such a wide range of knowledge about digital technologies.

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They probably already know how to do these things before we even asked them and to

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be able to allow them to tap into that knowledge that they bring to the classroom,

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I think would be really important. I don't think you're alone in your points of view here.

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As a matter of fact,

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I'd like to share an excerpt from a recent Inside Higher Ed article with the title It's time for Academe to Take Podcasting Seriously.

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And so here's the excerpt. In a moment, when higher education is moving into a new uncharted era,

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we'd like to offer the following concrete proposals for how to harness podcasting as a productive tool for teaching and scholarship.

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They are support faculty and student podcast creators at the institutional level.

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Assigned scholarly podcast as primary material instead of or alongside text and replace individual written assignments

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with team based podcast projects that mix written and audio components that pretty much aligns with what you just said,

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doesn't it? I think so. I think so, yeah. Can you speak a little about ways podcasts have positively impacted learners in your classes?

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Sure. Absolutely. So I'm thinking back to the times where I allowed students to create a podcast

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and submit a podcast production as an alternative to a written assessment.

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And I'm the one semester I'm thinking in particular.

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Thinking back, this was a learning experience for me in many ways.

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I think one of the issues I had is I tried to present the podcast as kind of the one mode that

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they needed to use because I was just was so kind of excited about incorporating podcasting.

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So I was gung ho and really encourage them to do podcasting.

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And I don't think I sort of really thought enough about the need for there to be multiple modes of trying to demonstrate their learning.

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So I shifted too quickly from the written assessment straight to podcasting.

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In terms of the positives from that experience, I do think, you know,

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there were students in the class that were struggling with some of the written assignments that did very well on the podcasting.

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And I have to think just anecdotally that the the podcast perhaps helped them to utilize some of their skills

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or some things that they were into that they weren't able to do in an essay or within a discussion post.

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So I was I was quite happy about that, that those students seen those students do quite well, seem to be a positive.

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It seemed to reinforce to me this the importance of those sort of multiple modes of of multiple types of

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assessments and multiple modes of of students being able to kind of demonstrate their knowledge in the class.

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I did have some students that wanted to when they when I told them about the podcast assignment,

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they wanted to do a video podcast instead, and I allowed them to do that.

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And I think that reinforced the point that I made earlier about the importance of multiple modes, you know,

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allowing students to be able to kind of maybe they were experimenting or they were thinking about what ways that they would like to do the assignment.

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And that allows them to tap into their own interests, into their own skills and ways of learning.

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So I think I actually thought of that as a positive and in an interesting way,

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by presenting the podcast assignment, it allowed some students to think more about,

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well, you know, this, this, you know, the video is a way that I sort of think creatively or I can think about knowledge.

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And so I really liked that. That was one of the outcomes.

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It does seem like there was it allowed for a kind of break, a break from the written format.

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There's a lot of stress, I think, and pressure that students feel with the traditional written assessment.

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And I don't think the podcast assignment was as stressful, even though there were ways of making it just as rigorous in terms academically speaking.

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And I liked that, you know, what was what was fun is we could give students time to work on their podcast projects in the class,

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and almost the classroom becomes almost kind of like a lab this this interesting kind of creative lab where they're

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actually kind of creating things on their computer or talking with their peers or their partners or otherwise.

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There is a lot of multitasking where they were thinking about the podcast project

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while we're also listening to a podcast and learning about a different topic.

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So I, I just think it really kind of expanded some of the,

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the various different tools that were available to me as an instructor and

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expanded the various different ways that the student could engage with the class,

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even ways that they may not even be realizing, you know,

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that just because it was different from an essay they were learning and engaging, even if they may not even known it at the time.

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So those were some of the things that that stuck out for me. And that experience is terrific when you think of learning being a social activity,

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largely just giving students that opportunity to be generative as well as dialoging is just fabulous, right?

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And the podcast is inherently a dialog format, usually, right?

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All of the discussion going on, which I think is important to emphasize.

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So let's turn to podcasting tools.

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Can you tell us a little bit about tools you have tried and if you prefer, one over the other?

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Sure. Sure. There's a lot of tools available.

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I'll say that, first of all. I mean, I think podcasting initially emerges sometime around.

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I think it's the nine 1990. So it's pretty it's still pretty recent in terms of being a sort of media form.

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But now on the Internet, there's a wide variety of different tools available for specifically for faculty.

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I mean, students probably already know this by now, but for faculty that don't have a lot of experience with podcasting,

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there are a wide variety of tools that are freely available on the Internet to engage in podcasting

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in terms of of hosting and in terms of being able to post and for people to be able to listen to it.

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There's just off the top of my head, there's three websites that offer free podcast hosting.

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So what that means is all you have to do is just give a few information, your name and email address,

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and you have a website and an account and you can upload the MP threes or the audio files and they'll not only host them on the website for free,

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but they'll also then share them on various different platforms to get the message out.

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There's Angkor FM, which I believe is owned by, I think, Spotify these days.

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SoundCloud is the biggest, the biggest a website for hosting and it has the largest number of podcasts.

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They both have a free version so anyone can open an account and start uploading their podcast.

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And then they also, I think, have a paid version which is a little bit more expensive,

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but it all have a free version that you can you can, you can use.

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And then iPod being, I think is another one that I think that's also a has a free and paid hosting service.

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There's a wide variety of those and they're easily available.

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The the benefits of I think Angkor is that it's unlimited podcast hosting.

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So you can upload as many podcast episodes as you like and it's always going to be free and they're always going to help you distribute them.

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On Google podcasts or Apple Podcasts, it makes it incredibly easy for, say,

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a faculty member who wants to link a podcast episode or distribute podcasts in their classroom.

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And then I was thinking to, in terms of audio editing,

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there's an open source software called Audacity, which is free, freely available on the Internet.

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It's relatively easy. You know, there's a little bit of an initial learning curve for learning what things do, but it's not overly difficult.

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You don't need specialized knowledge to be able to do it, and it's absolutely free.

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The students can download, the instructors can download it, and you can use that to edit podcast episodes.

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You can add in different music. So students could add in theme songs, they can add in things that they record from their phone.

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They can do a wide variety of different things.

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They can add sort of effects, but the possibilities are seemingly seem endless and it's completely free.

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So they're for podcasting in terms of cost.

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It's a relatively low threshold. You just really have to have Internet access really to be able to do it.

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And you just need a little bit of time, you know, to fit in,

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to think creatively about what you want to include in terms of distributing, hosting, editing the podcast.

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There are free tools on the Internet for anyone to be able to use.

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You know, we didn't talk much about this, but as let's just put a scenario out here,

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if you're a faculty member and you decided to actually experiment with podcasting,

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I can imagine the stages in the process of producing a podcast would be very helpful

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for students like you break down an assignment if indeed it was a podcast assignment,

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just being informative about the tools that are available to them.

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And then you mentioned something before about having a lab situation.

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Well, I can imagine students practicing elements of the production process in the lab.

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And so they would be guided and assisted by their professor.

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And also, again, getting back to that peer collaboration, which is.

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Really helpful. Right. And he gets everyone engaged in the learning process.

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Exactly. Yeah. And then plus for the instructor, too,

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it gives them multiple opportunities to intervene to see how the students are grasping at how they're

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engaging in the assignment if they're not be able to intervene to see the whole process as it goes.

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Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. What advice would you give to faculty who are considering using podcasts for the first time?

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There's a couple of things that come to mind when I think that. Number one, it's it's not it's pretty it's pretty cheap.

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And there's a relatively low threshold. It's not as hard to do podcasting as you may be thinking.

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So I'm thinking for for any faculty where they don't engage in pockets of podcasts, this is really something that they're interested in.

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The threshold for, for working with podcasts is not as high as you think.

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You don't have to have a skill set in audio production or anything specialized like that.

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There are websites for hosting. You can put the you can put audio links on YouTube.

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So being able to distribute the podcast and to allow the students to make their own podcast, they're going to be able to do it for free.

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There are tools for them to do it for free. There's not going to be extra money that the students need.

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It's going to be easy. And it's but the thing that I would emphasize, you just don't have to have as much specialized knowledge as you think.

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I just got to know that seems like something to emphasize enough.

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It's not it's not as difficult as some may think if they haven't done a podcast before.

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And then it's also, you know, just for us personally, in terms of the thousand faculty community, it's very easy to put it on Blackboard,

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you know, especially if you you just have an anchor, a FM or a SoundCloud account and then you just put the link up there.

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I mean, it's very, very simple. The one challenge there's a challenge that I think about in terms of incorporating podcasts,

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and I think some faculty would think about this and it has to do with maybe

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control over the assignment or the assessment because it's it's kind of open,

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right?

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Like for, for example, if you put material or, you know, lecture material on anchor, it's kind of just out there and it's available for students.

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On the one hand, it's more accessible for students. They're going to be able to access it more readily, perhaps than other platforms.

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But then it's also kind of putting the faculty out there a little bit, which I know would be kind of a tricky and complicated scenario.

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And I could see a lot of faculty being in my myself have thought about a little sort of being trepidatious, I guess.

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So what's your workaround for that?

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You know what I what I have done in the past, where I would I would put them actually on YouTube and put them as private.

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So at least I knew that they weren't open to the public and you couldn't just sort of distribute them anywhere.

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The other option that I've thought about is I I'm trying to think I think it's possible to upload the file.

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You upload the file by itself on Blackboard where you don't even need to have the hosting service.

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So that in that case, then the file is on the blackboard site.

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You're not even using anchor formula, even using SoundCloud.

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So that might be helpful as well, although the students should still be able to download the file.

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But I also think that that it just requires the faculty to be a little bit more cognizant about what they put on the podcast.

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You know, think about things that, you know,

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material that they'd be okay with people having and being able to listen to and have them be available to them and making sure that there

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isn't necessarily information that they don't want to get out to be able to student to access when they're doing an exam or something.

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So it might just require that faculty think about and be a little restrictive on what they

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do and don't include on the podcast because it's so accessible and available to students.

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Very good. Okay. So we hope our conversation opens a number of ways listeners and faculty can consider using podcasts for teaching and learning.

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Before we wrap it up, is there anything more you'd like to share, Sam?

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The only thing is I just podcasting are podcasts are so exciting for me and in part because I think there's they just they're so creative.

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I've listened to so many different really creative storytelling based podcasts that I think the things that students and faculty and researchers,

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academics,

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whoever, the things that they can do with podcasts just seem that it opens up a lot of imaginative and creative dimensions that I think has benefited.

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My class will hopefully continue to benefit my class and I think can benefit other people's classes as well.

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Terrific. Okay. So we want to thank our guest, Samuel Clevenger, for sharing his experience in this teaching and learning through podcast episode.

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Thank you, Sam, for making this podcast possible.

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Your contribution embodies our facet by faculty for Faculty Tag Line.

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Thanks so much. Really appreciate it. And to our audience, we'd like to thank you for tapping into our faculty success.

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Higher Ed Conversations Podcast Series. The first podcast series generates conversations on important topics that support faculty,

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professional growth and student success at Towson University.