Streaming Audio Lectures
by Evelyn Beck
Presentations you’ve been using in the classroom can be brought
to life on-line by adding an audio narrative.
“It brings the sense of a lecture,” says Les Howles, a senior consultant for the Department of Learning Technology and
Distance Education at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. “One thing often lost in on-line instruction is a sense of place, a
personality. Illustrated audio brings the oral, personal element back into instruction — something often missed in a text-based
and graphical interface.”
Howles recommends this format for material that is graphical in nature — such as illustrations, charts, and diagrams — and which would benefit from audio elaboration. He does not think that a typical PowerPoint slide presentation consisting simply of bulleted lists would be greatly enhanced by audio. He cites two examples of courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that have effectively incorporated audio on-line: One is an online dairy science course, which includes progressively built graphics;
the other, an on-line pediatrics course, which offers photographs of
doctors treating patients, along with flow charts about communication.
Before streaming technology became available in 1995, any student
wanting to view a multimedia presentation would have had to download huge files before viewing them. But streamed files are viewed as they are downloaded in real time, creating a much faster process and one that is accessible to those with slower computers.
Accessing streamed audio lectures is fairly easy for students, once
they’ve downloaded the (free) software they need. Creating those lectures is a bit more involved, however. One decision involves the
choice of technology, with RealMedia, QuickTime and Windows
Media among the available options. The instructor must consider
whether most of the students are using PC’s or Macintosh computers and must also evaluate his or her own technical skills.
Howles recommends “hooking up with someone on campus who can run a streaming server. Then you need to learn a few things
about bandwidth and recording audio.” Howles and his UW-Madison colleagues have designed an excellent on-line tutorial about creating streaming audio lectures at
http://pocahontus.doit.wisc.edu/iatutorial/index.html.
If you’re like me, all of that is the hard and very annoying part of the process. What’s fun is the pedagogical side: How do you design a really effective audiovisual lecture on-line?
Most experts recommend that you limit each lecture to about 10
minutes, since on-line learning often happens in small chunks of time. That ability to stop and start, says Grover Furr, who teaches English at Montclair State University, in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, is a real appeal of the medium. Quoting an article he has written on the topic, Furr says, “Students can pause, back up, and replay the lectures, or parts of them, as many times as they wish so that can make notes, answer the telephone, make a cup of coffee, and so on. With more time to assimilate the lecture material, they can also think more critically about it.”
Variety is also appealing, so can you bring in guest speakers, as Furr did for a Middle English literature class, recording a University of Georgia scholar reading the opening of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as part of an effort to “demonstrate various modern experts’ oral interpretations of Middle English texts,” he says. Or you can incorporate elements such as music to add atmosphere, as I did in an audio lecture I prepared for my on-line world literature students; I played a clip from a Ravi Shankar CD of Indian chants as a prelude to a discussion of the novel Clear Light of Day, which is set in India. (Copyright concerns can be minimized if you operate under fair-use guidelines and if your course environment is password protected.)
The text on PowerPoint slides used on-line should be limited to key words or phrases, with the narration expanding upon the ideas. Limiting each slide to one key picture or graphic also helps drive home the essential ideas, and a solid color background is recommended to minimize distractions. You should also read from a script written in a conversational style, much like a lecture you
might deliver in the classroom.
For me, creating and recording on-line lectures has provided a stimulating challenge. It has forced me to organize each part of a course much more effectively as I strive to reduce its essential elements to a 10-minute lecture. It has also forced me to think more visually than I normally do as I search for just the right illustration to accompany each slide. And it has led me to track down all kinds of interesting musical connections. In sum, it has
made me a better teacher.
Putting together a single 10-minute illustrated audio lecture takes a great deal of time. The prospect of offering a weekly lecture in each of my on-line courses is overwhelming, so I’m starting small, trying to create one effective lecture at a time, starting with existing PowerPoint presentations I have already used in class and modifying them for use on-line.
While this is some of the greatest effort I’ve expended in my on-line teaching, it is also exciting and rewarding. And once you start, you won’t want to stop.
