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What Students Can Learn from Making Podcasts

4/29/2014

I have been requiring freshmen who take my sections of the mandatory English Listening and Speaking course at KAIST to do a podcast project for the last three years. The students record at least two episodes of a podcast that they design and create a marketing plan for. Groups with two members are expected to record 4-5 minutes per episode. Groups with three members need to record 7-8 minutes per episode. Websites such as soundcloud.com are great for helping students put their podcasts on the internet and see how many listeners they can attract. Beyond the speaking and listening practice this project affords them, students also gain hands-on experience creating a product for a specific target audience. This will help them become better writers, presenters, and business people in the future.

Below you can find the rubric that I use for the project.

Objectives: teamwork experience, long-term & short-term time management/goal setting experience, understanding the importance of identifying a target audience and their needs, selecting appropriate content for a target audience, familiarity with relevant technology, advertising/promotion experience, recycling of presentation skills, and practical, task-based English practice.

Per episode

____ Did the episode(s) match the time requirements?

____ Spoke at an appropriate volume and speed

____ Appropriate language used/pronunciation understandable

____ Showed energy and enthusiasm

____ Appropriate episode introductions and conclusions

____ Segments were utilized

____ Appropriate teamwork

Overall

____ Was it designed with a target audience in mind?

____ Did the podcast format and content match the target audience?

____ Podcast could be sustained

____ Effective in terms of entertainment or education

____ Team made appropriate promotion plan (attractive and clear title, keywords for searching, target
listener description, marketing ideas, goal for hits)

____ Goals were met for number of hits

It wouldn't be fair of me to ask my students to undertake a project that I didn't have experience with myself. Before they begin I direct them to my podcasts: TEAK (Teaching English at KAIST) and Around the Carillon.

Students' podcast examples can be found here.

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Student Feedback of Teachers

4/27/2014

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Student feedback for teachers should not be collected until students have the opportunity to find out if what they learned and experienced in a course was useful for them. This may not be discovered until years later.

AT KAIST, students give both midterm and final evaluations to their professors. The feedback can be used to determine whether a professor should keep their job or not. Given the high-stakes nature of this feedback data, it would stand to reason that the data collected be as accurate as possible. But what can really be measured halfway through a course and one week before final exams?

The first thing that can be measured is whether or not the students have been enjoying the course. The problem here is that different factors cause students to enjoy courses. A course might be fun because it is easy, or the students enjoy the topic, or the teacher is friendly or humorous. These factors are rarely explored when collecting student feedback.

The second thing that can be measured is how satisfied the students were with their scores and progress up to the feedback period. A student who bombed their midterm is unlikely to be "highly satisfied" with the course. Their frustration, while justifiable, may be misdirected. Once again, this cannot be established from most surveys.

A final thing that can be measured is the popularity of the teacher. Everyone has heard stories either firsthand or "thirdhand" of teachers who give out candy or host pizza parties during the evaluation period. These teachers are often lauded by management as good examples but eyes roll when they are discussed by their colleagues. That being said, if they know how to game the rigged system then it is hard to fault them completely.

What cannot be measured, unfortunately, is whether or not the course and the information and experiences gleaned from it are of value to students after the course has ended. Students should be able to determine if the course being evaluated helped them in subsequent courses or after graduation before reporting on how effective the course and its teacher was.

I have been lucky enough to teach content courses during my time at KAIST and have met with students years after they took them. I am under no illusion that all of my students are completely satisfied with what they took away from my courses but after a few years I am much more sensitive regarding any feedback they want to share. After all, they now have a clearer picture of what I was trying to prepare them for.

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New Class, New Opportunties

4/23/2014

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Over the winter break an inter-department email went out asking if any professors would be interested in teaching a new course on current events. I had never taught a course specifically covering current events but thought it could be fun so I replied that if no one else wanted it, I would give it a try. Assuming someone else would snap it up, I quickly forgot about it. However, when the spring semester schedule was released the course was assigned to me. Ok, game on, I thought.

I remember first feeling excited and then scared when I started thinking about how to plan the course. I was excited because there were so many options and KAIST gives us a lot of latitude in how we design and run our elective courses. Then I started to feel scared because I didn't want the class to be boring or impractical and get a bad reputation after only one semester. Enrollment numbers and student feedback are important so planning an interesting and useful course was imperative.

The first thing I did was make a list of goals for the course. What would the students get out of it? What skills could they learn? What experiences could they gain? And finally, what information could they become more familiar with? Once I had a list of goals I made a second list of activities and projects. I saved this list and brought it to the first week of class. I explained to the students who had registered that this was a new course and even though I had some ideas about how it should be run I was open to suggestions. This is where things started to get fun.

We negotiated a large portion of what would take place in the course. We talked about how topics would be decided, how many people could work in a group, how the information on a certain current event topic would be shared, and how grading would be done. We decided that groups would choose a topic and work with it for two weeks. First they would research it and then do a short presentation about it. Based on the feedback and Q&A, they would then create a webpage for their topic or a set of informative videos. We are at the midterm week now and I feel like the course is progressing well. You can see what my students have created here: http://hss395.weebly.com/.

If I teach the course again I might do a few things differently but it would be because the new group of students made suggestions for what they would be more interested in doing. Planning a new course can be daunting but it is also an opportunity to create a new means for students to learn through English and have something to show for it at the end of the term.

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What Students Can Learn from Making Podcasts

Student Feedback of Teachers

New Class, New Opportunties

Tim's Thoughts

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