Using Podcasts for Learning? Why not?
by Suhaila Usuludin ~ June 22nd, 2008. Filed under: Latest News, School, Technology.The Chronicles of Higher Education
The Wired Campus. June 17, 2008
A Professor of Pediatrics Uses Podcasts to Enliven Bacteriology
Sarah E. Forgie, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Alberta, gives medical students song parodies and other offbeat study aids for her bacteriology class. Her favorite podcasts include “Sweet Tetani” (an infectious sendup of “Sweet Caroline”) and “Bad Bugs” (a parody of the Bloodhound Gang’s “The Bad Touch”).
Q. Why did you start doing podcasts?
A. This was actually a summer project I had a student do. I just had an idea. My kids love their iPods, and my husband loves his iPod. I’m not quite as savvy, but I thought, Wouldn’t it be cool if I could put something interesting and succinct on an iPod for my course?
Q. What did the student come up with?
A. I gave him the general information for the course and let him think about it and what would be useful to students. He made weekly reviews, including some songs.
Q. How were the podcasts received?
A. They were really helpful. Our hypothesis was that the students would like the songs better than the spoken podcasts, but they were pretty much equally well received.
Q. Did students who used the podcasts get higher grades?
A. The surveys about the podcasts were anonymous, so we don’t know.
Q. What other kinds of alternative teaching methods do you use in your class?
A. I do a beatnik poem about Harry Houdini. [The magician died of an infection after his appendix ruptured.] I came up with a way of setting this poem to music and called it “Harry Houdini and the Enteric Jazz Band.” I said, “Here are the bugs that are the big players in abscess formation. This bug is this instrument, and that bug is that instrument.” I started telling the story of how Harry Houdini died. At one point the saxophone stops and the other instruments keep going, just like how this one bug doesn’t die and sits there and waits for the right conditions. When the conditions are right in the story, the sax starts playing again. It kind of was to symbolize the time it takes for an abscess to form. In tests I found that stuff presented in notes or in more didactic lecture form resulted in 50- to 60-percent recall, and stuff from the jazz band had around 100-percent recall.
Q. Do these methods make your students better doctors?
A. Absolutely. It shows they can have a little bit of fun and still learn, and that not everything has to be serious and boring. —Catherine Rampell
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