Towards guidelines on educational podcasting quality: problems arising from a real world experience
by Marco Lazzari, Alberto Betella
Abstract
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This paper presents an experience of educational podcasting set up at the university of Bergamo (Italy), and derives from that experience some reflections upon the quality of the podcasting services, in order to promote the definition of guidelines on podcasting quality.
The aim of the paper is to foster a discussion about the quality of the podcasting services, since this topic is rather far from being deeply dealt by the literature. Web pages, scholarly papers and books about podcasting quality are very few and they are mainly concerned with recommendations about the quality of the audio (or video) files, whilst we do believe that a quality model for podcasting services should address multiple issues.
A short description of our experience shall allow us to introduce some of the most critical issues that should be taken into account by podcasters.
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Our podcasting (Pluriversiradio), which has been considered by Wikipedia the first official Italian university podcasting, was implemented by developing Podcast Generator, an open source library for building and managing podcasting services.
Podcast generator is a free PHP script released under GPL, that lets users upload media files via a web form and automatically creates rss 2.0 w3c-compliant podcast feeds, which are fully compatible with Juice and iTunes. Moreover, Podcast Generator acts as a content management system, able to manage a web site that hosts one or more podcast channels.
Besides the University of Bergamo, our software library is currently used by at least five hundred podcasting services in Italy and abroad.
Once the beta release of Podcast Generator has been delivered (March 2006), we have built Pluriversiradio as a web site to collect podcasts and to provide web surfers with the proper feeds for getting files from their podcast aggregators.
Pluriversiradio has been used during the second semester of the academic year 2005-2006 for courses on multimedia communication at the Faculty of Arts and Literature of the University of Bergamo; after that first experiments, other colleagues began recording podcasts for their students. Podcasts on Pluriversiradio can be classified as belonging to several different categories, according to their content and destination, such as Computer science, Anthropology, Tourism, Interview, Lesson, Workshop, and so on. For each category, a specific feed does exist for aggregators and a specific view on the database is available from the web site.
At the present time we are working to develop an ontology of podcast objects, developed in OWL using Protégé, in order to allow enriching each podcast with meta-descriptions suitable to be shared with software tools that could extend the poor access facilities currently provided by the aggregators (e.g. for creating “playlists”).
The development and management of an educational podcasting service led us to face the problem of the quality of the podcasts and of the service itself. Unfortunately, the literature provides little help on the subject: currently available guidelines highlight the importance of good quality recording and the relevance of the bandwidth, but a really applicable quality model does not exist.
Moreover, we underline that the aforementioned requirements, even if they are in some way “user-centered”, are rather general and do not take into account that different podcasts could have different audiences.
In our experience, we have to consider that our typical audience is mainly composed by students belonging to three different categories:
- central users: students who regularly attend the lessons and use the podcasting as a source of summaries or deepening;
- proximal users: students who sporadically attend the lessons, and therefore exploit the podcasts for integrating their knowledge;
- distal users: students who rarely attend the lessons, who exploit the podcasts as a source of distance learning.
Moreover, the academic environment suggests different ways to manage the podcasting, that can be used for recording lessons, but also workshops, conferences, discussions, interviews, and also for training students, who can produce podcasts by themselves as a part of their assignments.
On the ground of such experience we wish to address the attention to some attributes that should be taken into account for developing high quality podcasting services - we have identified three main attributes, each of them has two main subcategories, each subcategory has its own attributes that should be taken into account:
- Quality of the production environment:
- quality of the recording: microphones, recording environment, set-up, sampling rate, bit rate, …
- quality of the editing: filtering, mixing, compression, file formats, …
- Quality of the product:
- quality of the content: relevance, coherence, completeness, length (time), dimension (memory), …
- quality of the communication: format, style, enunciation, evidence, credibility, …
- Quality of the distribution environment:
- quality of the paratext: multiple feeds for multiple channels,compliancy (w3c, iTunes, Juice, …), meta-tagging, …
- quality of the management: server’s functionality, availability and bandwidth, time to answer, bug fixing, digital rights management, ...
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