iClass: A Professor In Your Pocket   May 2, 2006  

With every cool new toy—whether CD burners, camera phones, or MySpace—the old folks eventually catch on. That shiny iPod your parents bought for your birthday has officially crossed over, and thanks to recent initiatives at a growing number of universities, it might teach you something besides Pearl Jam’s bootleg catalogue.

Delivering lectures and other class material through an online podcast, called “coursecasting,” has been gaining steam, with both Duke and American universities holding separate conferences in the fall of 2005 to discuss the trend. Downloading lectures can help you review for exams, catch up on missed classes, or comprehend English as a non-native language.

Plenty of questions remain unanswered about whether coursecasting will give students an excuse to skip their live classes or if it’s wise for professors to make their course content available online in an age of digital-rights debacles. Regardless, the projects are evolving, joining Best Buy’s aisle full of white accessories as proof that iPod’s grip on the American psyche won’t be loosening anytime soon.

Ashley Amphipathic, Emily Exocytosis, Ryan Polyrobisome, and Blake BlastomerePurdue University, noted as a frontrunner in the iClass revolution, has more than seventy spaces across campus wired for immediate recording and lists more than sixty course feeds as part of its coursecasting program, dubbed “Boilercast.” Biology professor Laurie Iten has already taken the technology to the next level, creating video podcasts to aid students in four of her incoming-level classes. During short cartoons, characters with South Park style and scientific surnames make common biolab mistakes so students don’t have to. “Flash Forward” segments available before class run through a lab project’s basic procedures and common missteps, and similar “Rewind” segments review the previous lesson.

“The more zany you get, the more the students like it,” Iten says. “They’re actually kind of surprised learning can be fun.” Hence, Blake Blastomere occasionally dons a super villain’s costume, and Phil the Presumptive Physician dies in every episode.

“Not to be derogatory, but they have the attention span of a gnat,” Iten says. “Podcasts and short online tutorials are the way to get information to them in the way they want.”

Apple’s iLife software provides Iten with the tools for her podcasts at a relatively low cost after an educational discount. “It gives you just about everything you need for forty bucks,” she says. “The most time spent is working on the content of the podcasts, not producing them. We always try to build podcasts that can be reused; therefore, they should make our workload lighter.”

Speaking of workload, the big question is whether students are willing to add to their own. Iten doesn’t know how many of her students took advantage of the “Rewind/Flash Forward” casts, and Purdue freshman Michael Patzer—who found the visual-learning approach of the biology podcasts helpful—says the general trend of coursecasting has yet to take over campus.

“I would say half of the students know about it, and most do not use it,” he says. “Usually if someone can’t take an hour to go to class, they can’t take an hour to sit and listen to a lecture. I think the way my biology class uses it, as a short ten-minute preparatory tool, is probably the best way.”

Give us your thoughts on coursecasting:

Does teaching need to adapt to the shorter attention span of a media-inundated generation?
Do you see yourself strolling around campus listening to a psych lecture?
Will this trend of portable education stick around, or is it just a fad inspired by America’s favorite gadget?

— Steve Marzolf