Professor Eric Dewar and students create a podcast for class
Students from Eric Dewar’s Anatomy and Physiology course huddle around a softball-sized orb balanced on a short metal tripod at the corner of his desk. They’re working on an extra credit project, recording a podcast into the space-aged looking microphone for class.
Dewar, a paleontologist and assistant professor in the Biology Department, is one of several professors in the College using podcasting in his courses, uploading lectures and class recordings to iTunes University and making course content as mobile as a browser or mp3 player.
“Part of what I wanted to do with this is meet students where they are,” he says. “But I also wanted to show students that scholarship or research in science isn’t something that requires a ton of buildup, it’s just what we do when we’re scientists and any way we can communicate our ideas is positive.”
The podcasts might be 10-15 minute lecture recaps or topics examined by students in small groups. “The thing I like about being able to involve students in the podcast is creating a sense of ownership,” he says. “Students have had tons of science by the time they get to college. But have they ever really done science? I want to model what a professional scientist does. Students can do this. It’s like an Amish barn raising, and when we’re done we have something we built ourselves and it looks nice.”
Students post the recorded podcasts online for their classmates. Eventually, some podcasts may reach a wider audience. “I’m hopeful that some student projects can be made publicly available,” he says, anticipating results from project-based laboratories, surveys, or data gathered from the basketball team, for example, to see what their oxygen consumption is like on a treadmill. “That’s the kind of thing we can post up on the public site and say, here’s what students are doing at Suffolk.”
“A student told me she was driving in her car, and her boyfriend was looking at her iPod and said, ‘What’s this anatomy thing you have? Oh hey let’s listen to it.’ To know that I’m somewhere between Beyoncé and 50 Cent in my students’ playlists I think is very funny.”
