Author: Susan Stuart (s.stuart@philosophy.arts.gla.ac.uk)
JISC e-Learning Activity Area: learning resources and activities
Higher Education Academy Subject Centre: philosophical and religious studies
Case study tags: online learning, use of podcasting, an effect on learning, an effect on exam results, an effect on student personal development, student satisfaction with e-learning, innovation in learning and teaching, an influence on educational research, staff satisfaction with e-learning,staff personal development, a positive effect on retention, an influence on policy,modifications to learning spaces, an effect on social equality, tangible benefits of e-learning, university of glasgow, learning resources and activities, philosophical and religious studies
Background & Context
Brief Overview
Since 1996 I have been involved in using technology imaginatively to enhance both the learning experience for students and the teaching experience for myself.
From 1996-98 I developed web-based self-assessment exercises to enable Level 1 and 2 Philosophy students to establish a grounding in the meaning and use of complex terms and concepts.
In 1999/00, and with the assistance of colleagues in the Open University, I set up online seminars for my Senior Honours Kant class. This project turned out to be a little over-ambitious since the students felt confident with neither the technology (First Class) nor the Kantian terminology, and were thus unwilling to express their thoughts in writing publicly.
In 2001/02, and in receipt of a major award from the Philosophy and Religious Studies LTSN, I made use of electronic handsets in my Logic lectures with the intention of encouraging the normally quiet students to engage in an anonymous environment. The handsets were a great success making full-class participation a reality, and giving the students immediate feedback on what they were grasping and me immediate feedback on what they were not. The students judged them a resounding success.
From 2002/03 as part of the continuous assessment for third year non-Honours courses students were asked to design and develop a web page relevant to their seminar topic. Students reported that this method of assessment had clarified how they might structure their arguments or claims graphically before writing essays in the future.
In 2005/06 I began to record my Kant and Consciousness lectures using an iPod and making the sound files available to the students after the class. The recordings for Consciousness are available here http://podlearn.arts.gla.ac.uk/feeds/0001.rss and the Kant lectures are available here http://podlearn.arts.gla.ac.uk/feeds/0005.rss. The Kant podcasts can also be found by doing a search on iTunes.
In the same year I introduced a MOODLE for each of my five classes: Kant, Consciousness, The Art of Rhetoric, Consciousness & Cognition, and Space, Cyberspace & the Self.
Podcasting
Why did you use this e-learning approach?
A colleague, Steve Draper (Psychology), had a student (Joe Maguire) from Computing Science who was keen to examine the benefits of mobile learning and needed a 'guinea pig'. I'm keen to try new things with my students but only if there is an explicit agreement that if something's not working, we don't force it. So, we began by recording my (and my colleague Stephen Bostock's) Consciousness lectures for a Senior Honours class of both Philosophy and Psychology students. The student feedback was so positive that we decided to continue the experiment with my Senior Honours Kant class.
There was no Institutional policy to use podcasts but our success (My husband, Norman Gray, uses them with equal success for his lectures on General Relativity at the University of Glasgow) has encouraged others to try.
What was the context in which you used this e-learning approach?
Both courses are for Final Year students. The Consciousness course was developed in response to independent requests from the Philosophy Department and the Psychology Department in May 2005, and had its first year of delivery in 2005/06. I have been teaching the Kant course, examining the Critique of Pure Reason, 1996/97.
The Psychology students are extremely motivated and are greedy for any learning support or additional resources. The Philosophy students in the Kant class show a great deal of determination. Both classes work very hard, and repay the effort taken on their behalf.
Both courses count towards the graduating curriculum for the MA (Honours) Philosophy, and the Consciousness course also counts towards the graduating curriculum for the MA (Honours) Psychology.
Dr Stephen Bostock teaches with me on the Consciousness course.
The Consciousness course has 20 formal contact hours (12 lectures and 8 seminars) but the face-to-face seminar meetings run on in Term 2 for anyone who wants to participate. In those classes, as in the other 8 seminars, we read and discuss a contemporary academic paper that deals with some important area of the debate.
The Kant class has 20 formal contact hours (all lectures) but I run additional (informal) seminar meetings where we discuss anything that the students find troublesome.
I anticipated no problems or challenges that this context would produce in terms of implementation of the e-learning approach, and there were none.
What was the design?
Joe Maguire lent me his iPod. I recorded my lectures. At the end of the week he retrieved the iPod, downloaded the files and made them available on a University website. The students were given the URL for the site and a password, and they could access and download the recordings from anywhere at all. Joe also produced the RSS feed that made the MP3s into podcasts. For the Consciousness class we also recorded the Seminars in Term 1, and for the Kant class we recorded a short introductory video about the philosophical background in which Kant was writing. These were made available in the same way, and students with video iPods could even watch the video on the bus on their way home!
I have no formal training in learning pedagogy and design. I think a great deal of my success with students is a result of watching their reactions and responding to them in real time; my teaching is tempered by their responses and their responses are tempered by my teaching. It is a dynamic and reciprocal interaction that lends itself to a rapid contingency in my teaching and the student learning. One of the things that I do notice about my teaching is that there is quite a lot of dialogue in my lectures. I like the students to think, to puzzle, and to ask questions in the lecture, and I don't always like to have the answer off pat but be able to think about it during and after the lecture, and to add additional comments on the MOODLE for us all to think about afterwards. It's also useful for the students to see that answers aren't always that easily forthcoming and that sometimes you need to give things a little more thought before you speak.
How did you implement and embed this e-learning approach?
There is nothing to embed or roll out. All you need is access to some spare networked disk space and you can put up audio (MP3s) and video (MPGs) files for students and, of course, for your colleagues if they're preparing for a seminar on your material.
I think the only training necessary would be in turning odd audio file formats like AIFF into usable MP3s. Maybe this is simply a technical problem that someone, not the lecturer, should be expected to do, but with something that isn't Institution policy, there are things that you need to learn because they're not supported.
The evaluation has, so far, only been done informally. The students reported enthusiastic use of the recordings, and the number of times accessed and downloaded was recorded. The students enjoyed being able to replay the lectures and seminars to catch bits they'd missed or felt they hadn't understood the first time. Almost all of the students said that they'd used the podcasts when preparing and writing their essays, and for revision for their examinations.
The only complaint we experienced was when there was a delay putting some recordings on the web, but this was over the Christmas period and I promised the student that I would not be interrupting Joe's Christmas holiday to insist that he speed things along!
Technology Used
What technologies and/or e-tools were available to you?
As mentioned above, I also made use of a MOODLE for each course, and there are online databases of electronic texts. The MOODLE was used enthusiastically, even high-spiritedly, by the Consciousness students, but much less so with Kant. There is a very steep learning curve with Kant that just isn't there - or at least is not perceived to be there - by the Consciousness students. What they don't know with Kant is evident from the start; what they don't know with Consciousness might never be clear to them.
Tangible Benefits
What tangible benefits did this e-learning approach produce?
Successful, happy students, though I'm not sure that this is a tangible benefit.
The pass rates for both courses is 100% and the proportion of First Class marks is high. (Two different external examiners have verified that all is in order.)
The students seem to appreciate the podcasts, but since they were satisfied before I'm not sure I'd want to say that there has been a significant improvement in student satisfaction with the learning process. It's certainly true to say that there has been a significant improvement in my colleague's satisfaction with, and enthusiasm for, e-learning, and other colleagues now also seem to be interested in employing the method. I think the students are also more enthusiastic about e-learning.
From the communication I have received from my peers and people around the world who have listened to my Kant lectures as podcasts (downloaded from iTunes) and who now say they are going to read more philosophy or even return to education, I have probably been instrumental in widening participation in higher education.
Did implementation of this e-learning approach have any disadvantages or drawbacks?
This year Joe had graduated and embarked on his MSc, and this meant he wasn't so freely available. For this reason I had to learn to do the audio file reformatting myself and this was time consuming. However, a quick way around this was to use a very simple Sanyo voice-recorder (ICR-S250RM) which used an MP3 recording format. No reformatting, and ready for immediate upload to the MOODLE or other website.
How did this e-learning approach accord with or differ from any relevant departmental and/or institutional strategies?
My colleague, Ian Anderson (HATII), was also involved in podcasting his lectures in 2005/06. A few others began to use the technology in 2006/07, including my husband in Physics and Astronomy, but otherwise our use did not accord with departmental or institutional strategy. However, our success has raised its profile and there are now strategies to make more use of this form of e-learning.
We have certainly influenced the Institutional policy. With the success and publicity I have had, particularly in relation to the Kant podcasts, the University has decided to invest in podcasting for the future and Joe Maguire's expertise and enthusiasm is now being recognised - he has been given a full-time job working between the Teaching and Technology Unit and Computing Science.
It would also be fair to say that we have had an effect on the social justice agenda by widening participation in the classes. One of the students who was enrolled for both classes suffered from depression and for extended periods he was agoraphobic. With the podcasts he was able to keep up with the lectures and seminar discussion, and with the combination of podcasts and MOODLE he was able to engage in the forum discussions without feeling he had fallen behind in his level of understanding or engagement in the class. However, his story is not an unmitigated success for, although his essays were very good, he was unable to sit the examinations and has been awarded an Unclassified or Aegrotat degree.
Lessons Learned
Summary and Reflection
Podcasting is not difficult though it can be frustrating, for example, when you get half way through a lecture and have forgotten to switch the microphone to 'on' - this doesn't happen with an Apple iPod, but it did happen with the Sanyo - or when the batteries have run out and you didn't notice. However, the student feedback is very positive and encouraging, and my plan for next year is to take snapshots of the chalk/white board throughout the class and put them up as images to accompany the recordings. I'm also working with my husband on enabling the students to tag the recordings to make note-taking and revision from them easier.
Here's one of the messages I've received. There are many more but this is a UK example and it's from someone who's not currently in education but has downloaded the Kant podcasts and is thinking of coming back into education. I have, of course, anonymised it.
From: xxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxx
Subject: A New Pupil (Unofficial)
Date: 22 May 2007 20:55:35 BDT
To: S.Stuart@philosophy.arts.gla.ac.uk
Dr. Stuart,
I am sure you have a very busy 'inbox' so I hope you will not be too upset with this unsolicited email.
I am an 'unofficial philosophy student' who has come to the subject in my early 40s, having followed an engineering and business career - for the sake of mammon!
I am trying to teach myself philosophical concepts through all sorts of media. I am extremely interested in the Philosophy of Religion (from a strictly Atheistic perspective) and, through a web search, I found your podcast lectures on Kant's Epistemology; not necessarily related I know.
The reason for this e-mail is to say that I am just "gutted" that I cannot afford to give up work, move North and come to study under you. I think your style of teaching is great and I envy your intellect and knowledge. I listen to your podcasts on my hour-long commute into work in the morning and I feel like I am now part of your extended class.
That's all really. You have such an important role in developing the minds of so many young people. I don't know if you get much feedback from non-Glasgow associates; however, please accept these well intentioned words from a stranger and keep up your fantastic work.
If you ever decide to do a 'distance learning' course; I will be first in the queue.
Kind Regards
xxxxxxxxxx
Further Evidence
We have certainly influenced the Institutional policy. With the success and publicity I have had, particularly in relation to the Kant podcasts, the University has decided to invest in podcasting for the future and Joe Maguire's expertise and enthusiasm is now being recognised - he has been given a full-time job working between the Teaching and Technology Unit and Computing Science.
From the communication I have received from my peers and people around the world who have listened to my Kant lectures as podcasts (downloaded from iTunes) and who now say they are going to read more philosophy or even return to education, I have probably been instrumental in widening participation in higher education.
