University of Michigan - Flint

A Podcasting committee, comprised of staff from ITS and OEL, began planning in Winter 2006 semester to investigate how to implement podcasting for both online and on-campus classes.

For a definition of podcasting, please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting. 

A Technology Brown Bag was held on Wednesday, November 15, 2006, to introduce podcasting to the campus.

The Podcasting committee has been working on a solution for recording and making podcasts available for UM-Flint students who are attending classes both online and in the classroom.  The plan is to use Free Hi-Q to record the lecture in MP3 format and the MP3 file is uploaded to a Blackboard course's Content Collection. 

Then a lecture feed (xml file) for the course is generated.  ITS has created a web-based Podcast Feed Generator to assist with this chore.  The xml file is then uploaded into the Content Collection and the URL of the feed is provided to the students. 

As of Thursday, November 9th, 2006, the open source Podcasting Building Block for Blackboard became available, and the Podcasting Committee will be looking at it for future installation.  To view a demo of how Podcasts will work in Blackboard, please visit http://breeze.unl.edu/bbpodcast/. 

• Podcasts bring classrooms, labs to listeners
• U-M Dentistry collaborates with Apple to podcast lectures
• Educause Article - U-M Podcasting Pilot
• http://www.apple.com/education/solutions/itunes_u/
• http://www.podcast.net/
• http://www.podcastdirectory.com/category/Education
• http://www.podcastingnews.com/topics/Podcasts.html
• http://www.digitalpodcast.com/browse-science_and_technology-17-1.html   

History:

The team attended a teleconference/netmeeting with Tegrity on Tuesday, January 31, 2006, to talk about Tegrity's Blackboard Building block. For information about how podcasting works in Blackboard using Tegrity, please visit http://www.blackboard.com/company/press/release.aspx?id=800330.  For more information about Tegrity, please consult http://www.tegrity.com/.

Another solution that the team investigated was WebPod Studio™, software to produce audio and video PodCasts.  For more information about WebPod Studio™, please visit http://www.lionhardt.ca/wps/.