Podcasts
City of Glasgow College, Scotland
Podcasting
Podcasting was adopted by the HND Retail Management Course Team to allow the students to connect directly with successful industry representatives. The podcasts can be found on SoundCloud as ‘Retail Chats’.
The goal of the podcasts was to increase engagement between students and industry. The podcasts also offered an opportunity to enhance student learning experience by providing them with different methods of learning. The podcasts were focused on industry practices and the guest speakers would inspire the students by talking about their successful career paths.
The team utilised recording equipment from the our Learning Technologies & Creative Industries departments which consisted of a microphone, recorder and soundproof booths. Dropbox was the preferred storage system, as it was able to be linked to the soundproof booths. Therefore, any recording would be automatically uploaded. The editing software was called ‘Audacity’ https://www.audacityteam.org and this was chosen as it was easy to use and it allowed the students to minimise the background noise, creating high quality podcasts.
The app ‘SoundCloud’ was used to broadcast the podcasts as this was already a popular app that students were using to listen to music. This was the preferred software as accounts were free to create and use.
The students used social media to promote the podcast which brought a lot of attention to the course. It also provided the course with a bank of materials that could be used in the classroom, allowing the students to experiment. This gave the students a more flexible learning experience.
It is important to have a project plan have everything organised beforehand. Another tip would be to make sure to plan ahead for industry speakers so they can be available.
The main resource that was recording equipment and technical support if something went wrong.