Podcasting: The Digital Dental Student's Scribe Service

The Class of 2008 collaborated with the U-M Office of Dental Informatics to investigate new strategies to assist learning lecture information.   The criteria for success identified at the beginning were:  low-cost, minimal staff time, quick turn around time and easy-to-use technology.
A series of three pilots were conducted.  The first pilot compared three media formats: video, audio synced with PowerPoint and audio only.  The results of a survey and an examination of the server logs demonstrated that an overwhelmingly preference for audio only.   The second pilot investigated two acquisition methods—a laptop and an iPod.  Each captured the audio from the lecture hall’s PA system.  The laptop had far superior audio quality.  The third pilot investigated streamlining the workflow of capturing, processing, posting and acquiring the audio files.  Scripts were written that allowed students to start and stop the recording, enter metadata about each recording (Lecture Title, Lecturer, and Class).  The file was then transferred to a processing machine which converted the recording to both MP3 and AAC files and posted them on a course Web site.  Additionally, based on student feedback in both surveys and focus groups RSS (Really Simple Syndication) was added to the Web site thus allowing students to automatically download the audio files to their computer.  This is the first known “podcasting” of dental lectures in the nation.  The project’s three phases saw a number of changes.  Student participation, which was voluntary, increased from approximately 1/3 of the class in the first pilot to approximately 2/3 in the third pilot.  The amount of time of recorded increased from 3.5 to 15 hours/week.  The time to process and post one hour of recording decreased from 2 days after the lecture to four minutes.  Finally, the staff time decreased from 2 hours/class hour to approximately 15 minutes/week.
Thus, the original four goals were met, the project was declared a success and it is now being implemented in ¾ of the lectures halls and a summative evaluation is being planned.   The entire podcasting process will be demonstrated.