Using the Edges of the Education Network – Why Not Let Students do the Podcasting?
I’ve been having some fascinating discussions with Elmer Masters, CALI’s Internet Guy(tm). We have been hashing out the next phase of the Legal Education Podcasting Project (or LEPP II for short). The success of LEPP I and the amount of press that podcasting and education is getting that podcasting education content is going thermonuclear.
In LEPP I, 30 faculty recorded their own classroom lectures or created weekly summaries. I have not doubt that we could double or triple that number in the Fall of 2006, but how can we 10x or 100x it?
The solution, I believe, is at the edges of the network – the students.
What if we could design the system so that students who get faculty permissions do the work of recording the class and creating the podcast for the rest of their students in the class? This would remove the barrier of time and unfamiliarity from the the faculty. It also places the tech part of podcasting into the hands of digital natives (vs. faculty who are digital immigrants).
This ideas is inspired by Don Zhou (here’s a link is to a podcast interview I did with Don) who is a a law librarian at William Mitchell College of Law and a law student. Don went to his instructors and asked them if he could record the classes and post them for the rest of the students as podcastas. Two agreed and he provided this service to much rejoicing from his fellow students. Why not expand on this idea?
In short, the system would operate like this…
- CALI announces the availability of blog space for LEPP II and encourages faculty to find student volunteers, students to approach faculty or whoever makes the first move.
- Students would get explicit permission from their instructors and explain the issues involved in podcasting
- Podcasting happens…
We (as in CALI) need to work out the logistics of how students get faculty to communicate their permission to us. We would also create FAQs, screencasts and other support materials to explain how everything works to the faculty, student podcaster and other students. We would need to work out what happens if a student podcaster drops the ball (and we start getting nasty-grams from the other students in the class).
It would be great to find some tangible way to incentivize or reward student podasting volunteers, but maybe the appreciation of their peers is sufficient. We could include some kind of PayPal link and softly ask the other students who are using the podcasts to give a couple of bucks that we would route back to the student podcast volunteer if they maintain a good record of keeping the podcasts coming. That would provide an incentive, but it might blunt the impulse to "volunteer" and turn in more into a work-for-hire type situation. This is always a difficult balance.
A student who volunteers to record all of his classes (and secures permission from all his instructors) could rake in a couple of hundred dollars or could get stiffed. If we create a marketplace, will an invisible hand insure quality and timeliness?
You might ask, why doesn’t CALI just pay students to do this? Well, do the math. There are 200 law schools offering 100+ courses each semester. That’s 20,000 courses. The numbers won’t scale for CALI as a non-profit. We have to rely on the faculty or students to make the recordings and hope that they see the benefit that it accrues to them.
More to come on this.
