Students download complete lectures

Professors start using new technology to motivate work outside classroom

College students who decide to keep snoozing rather than make a mad dash for a morning class might soon find it easier to hear what they missed -- word for word.

A small but growing number of professors are turning class lectures into podcasts, free audio computer files that students can download to iPods or other portable MP3 players.

College instructors have posted written materials and slides online for years. It is only recently, though, that professors have started making the whole shebang -- the lecture and subsequent give-and-take -- available to their classes at the tap of a computer key.

"The general consensus here at Duke is it's going to change higher education, maybe ultimately very dramatically," said Richard Lucic, a professor of the practice of computer science at Duke University. "The basic thought is we probably don't even know all the ways it's going to change it yet."

This new technological twist in the delivery of higher education has sparked questions similar to those that arose when universities started offering online courses.

Back then, skeptics wondered whether Internet chat rooms would become the college classrooms of this century.

If courses could be taken online, they conjectured, students might miss a large part of the educational experience by rarely coming face to face with each other or their instructors.

"I don't like the online stuff, I'll be really frank, and I'm a technology guy," said Gary Wilcox, an advertising and marketing professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

But Wilcox is on the crest of the podcasting wave that's starting to make a splash on campuses.

He records his lectures for students in an entry-level advertising and marketing class in which students must do well if they plan to pursue an advertising degree. Then he posts his recordings online so students can download them.

Students can store them on laptop and desktop computers. They can load them onto iPods and other sleek, pocket-size players and listen to their professors' words as they work out on a treadmill, rush from class to class or study with friends.

"I just think of this as a tool" Wilson said.

The Texas professor noticed a spike in the downloading of lectures shortly before exams. He said he did not see a drop in classroom attendance.

Pick-A-Prof, a Texas-based company that has Web sites at which students can rate faculty, recently waded into the podcasting service. The company offered CourseCasting at the University of Texas and Texas A&M last fall.

At Texas, 44 lectures were posted by three professors, according to Pick-A-Prof literature. The lectures were downloaded more than 800 times and used by 145 students.

The company now offers the service to N.C. State University and UNC-Chapel Hill. But Karen Bragg, director of university relations at Pick-A-Prof, said last week that it was too soon to tell whether the podcasting arm of the service would be widely used on the North Carolina campuses.

At UNC-CH, some professors in the business school are leery. Sridhar Balasubramanian, an associate professor of marketing, worries that podcasts make it too easy for students to listen to lectures on the run without giving the professor undivided attention.

"I don't see it as revolutionizing anything," Balasubramanian said.

At Duke, where the university issued free iPods to all its freshmen in 2004, Lucic is a big fan of podcasting and vodcasting -- adding video into the mix. To make sure students do not skip class because of the availability of the information outside the classroom, Lucic requires discussion in class for a passing grade.

Podcasts, Lucic said, enhance the class discussion. Students can revisit particularly complicated topics on their own and free up class time that professors might have used to go over the subject matter repeatedly.

"It's a very subversive way to get them to work on stuff after class hours," Lucic said.

In his class, he asks students to podcast papers -- recording their papers on an audio file -- which adds a new dimension to their work and to the people who see it.

"The real interesting thing is that the quality of the report is better than when it was only a written report," Lucic said. "Somehow I think they're putting more thought and research into it. Maybe it's because it's so novel."

Grading podcasts has presented new challenges for Lucic. But having his students podcast their papers gives him a different perspective of someone who might not speak up much in class.

Those who advocate podcasting lectures and class discussions see the technology as offering little different from the note-taking services or tape-recorded sessions that students used to rely on when they missed class.

But podcasting advocates acknowledge that there still is much to ponder about delivering higher education in such a fashion.

"This is still in the beta phase," Lucic said.