CALIOPOLIS

In the Spring/Winter 2006 semester, CALI conducted the Legal Education Podcasting Project where about 30 faculty recorded their classroom lectures or created weekly summary podcasts for their students.

We did a mid-semester survey and the results were reported here. The PDF of that report is here.

I have also conducted about a dozen interviews with the participating faculty and posted these interviews as podcasts. This link will bring up all of those interviews.

I have compiled the results of our end-of-semester survey and the full report as a PDF can be found here – LEPPEndSemesterSurvey.pdf

The survey results are fairly consistent with the mid-semester survey, but there are some interesting things to porint out.

38.4% listened to most or all of the podcastst. Since some of the courses only used weekly summary podcasts, that number may be higher if you include the 6-10 survey respondents. For a brand new technology to get 50% of the students to use it so much is a pretty good indicator.

The majority of students listened to the podcasts on their PCs or laptops. This, I believe is indicative of the penetration of iPods and other MP3 players in the "older student" market. A year old Pew Research survey (PDF) tells us that 1 in 5 American between 18-28 own MP3 players and law students probably skew towards the higher end of that age group.

THIS is interesting and not too unexpected. We heard from several faculty that they had received emails from students who were NOT in their course THANKING them for their podcasts. In some cases, these were students who were not even in law school. It was for this reason that we asked faculty podcasters to NOT put passwords on their blogs to see if there would be any second-order effects and this is the proof.

It is important to note that we did not advertise in any explicit way and that it’s a little difficult to find the course podcasts, so any indicators of extra-course use is significant. Most of the faculty I have talked to about this were happy that students outside of their course found their podcasts useful. At least one faculty was concerned that the podcasts may be used inappropriately or out of context.

We wanted to see if we could measure any significant skipping of classes due to the availabiilty of the podcasts. None of the faculty interviewed said they noticed drops in attendance, but we get a more mixed message from the survey results. Oddly, some students reported attending the podcasted classes more than other classes.

What might not be clear from our survey question is that students felt more comfortable skipping a class that they would’ve had to skip anyway due to family emergency, weather or other reasons. The faculty I interviewed definitely indicated that students were pleased to be able to listen to podcasts for classes that they had to miss.

73.8% indicated Excellent or Above Average value. I don’t doubt that the survey instrument skews toward students who used and liked the podcasts, but that’s a pretty good number anyway.

We are working on plans for LEPP II. We are looking at a three-pronged approach…

1. Support for individual faculty as in LEPP I,
2. Support for law school IT departments that want to provide podcasting services to all of their faculty and courses, and,
3. Support for students who are willing to get permission from their instructors and do the work of recording and posting podcasts for the benefit of everyone in the courses they are taking.

This last one really pushes podcasting to the edges of the network and is perhaps our most viral strategy. Stay tuned for more developments.