Podcasting Case Study: Middlebury College

Rationale

Middlebury College has piloted a program that uniquely combines select podcasting techniques in an effective new way for its second-language students to practice and develop their skills. The college was drawn to podcasting and iPods because of their ability to:

• facilitate mobile and anytime/anywhere access,
• expand the formats in which students can access course content,
• support the creation of custom learning objects through standard music-player software functions such as playlists, and
• enable students to record their language practice and instructors to monitor their progress outside the classroom.

Description

Used with permission of Cyprien Lomas.

In both 2005 and 2006, Middlebury piloted the distribution of iPods to about 100 students in its summer language program. These iPods were loaded with sound files of the vocabulary words, dialogues, and other audio materials the students would need for the entire term. They were also fitted with voice recorders to allow students to record their language practice outside class.

Throughout the term, the students actively used the iPods and the files on them to study and practice. In a French phonetics class, for example, students were required to make audio recordings of spoken words twice a week. They uploaded the recordings to their computers and then posted them to a class Web site. This allowed the instructor to easily monitor their progress and provide feedback to students as needed.

When the iPods were returned to the school at the end of the term, the college extracted the usage data that had accumulated and analyzed it to determine how students had used the devices and the learning resources on them.

Implementation

Prior to the summer language program, the instructors selected materials they wanted loaded onto their students’ iPods. These materials included instructor-created content, files from textbook CDs, radio broadcasts, and music that would help their students practice. The instructor-created content was prepared either using the instructor’s own recording device or in the college’s recording studio. Copyright issues related to the use of these materials were being monitored.

Pedagogical metadata were embedded in the audio files to enable instructors to easily organize and refer students to the files. This was accomplished by making use of tags originally created within the audio file formats for describing music files (for example, album, artist, and genre) and playlist functions. Because more than one thousand files were loaded onto each iPod, the added functionality was very useful.

Educational technology staff prepared and added metadata to the selected materials, formatted the iPods, and transferred the materials onto them. Each iPod took about 100 hours to load, and all told, all tasks related to preparing the iPods took about 300 staff hours.

At the beginning of the summer programs, the educational technology staff held hour-long sessions for both the instructors and the students to instruct them on the use of the iPods. The few support issues that arose shortly afterward, which dealt primarily with the iPod’s recording functions, were referred to the college’s media lab. Overall, the students had no remarkable support needs.

After the summer terms ended, the iPods were returned to the college; about 10 percent of them were no longer fully usable. Using a program the college developed, XML files of usage data were extracted from the iPods and imported into an aggregated database for analysis.

Results

The program was a mixed success. The iPods were well used, but students encountered a few minor problems that they now know how to correct. For example, the voice-recording function did not always work well, and transferring files from the iPod to the Web was sometimes tricky. They also found that some of the files were too short for playback to be easily controlled on the iPod; as a result, they increased the length of the files.

The college is considering discontinuing the program for the summer language students, primarily because of the short life span of the machines and because most students already owned iPods or other portable audio players. In the meantime, the college is offering current students language content on the college Web site in a format that can be used widely by any media player. To compensate for the iPod’s recording function, students can buy separate audio recording devices.

Regardless of the program’s long-term potential, the ability to extract usage data from the iPods offered useful insights on exactly how and when the iPods had been used, including the popularity of specific resources. The metadata enabled the faculty and students to customize the way they organized and used their materials.

Faculty used this extracted data from the iPods to improve their efforts. For example, if playback data for a single vocabulary word showed that it was played many times, it could mean that the file was popular—or that it was replayed because it was hard to understand. To compensate for this particular situation, they now record three repetitions of each vocabulary word in a single sound file.

The college will be expanding the use of educational metadata with all audio files. It will be included in all new audio files during the creation process, and it will be retroactively added to older files as time allows. To make better use of its growing collection of educational microcontent such as the audio files created for the iPod program, the college is seeking a robust content management system.

Impact on Teaching and Learning

Two surveys were given to the students participating in the iPod pilots. The first garnered few responses, but many students completed the second. Most said the iPods were helpful, especially with pronunciation and vocabulary studies. None went so far, however, as to create his or her own podcasts. Only a very small handful of students used the iPods outside of their intended educational purpose for recreational activities such as downloading music.

As for Middlebury faculty, few outside the project embraced podcasting. The main exception was the school’s writing program, whose innovative faculty had already been recording class sessions and posting them to class blogs after each class.

Reflection

Even though the Middlebury iPod pilot program may not be continued, it succeeded in highlighting the potential value of mobile listening and recording devices like iPods to provide a new way for students to access language-learning materials and for instructors to easily monitor student progress outside class. Also, the use of metadata to organize microcontent like spoken vocabulary words and dialogue promises to make such material easy to find and manipulate when used within content management systems.

Further Reading

• Middlebury College Language School iPod Pilot Project, <https://segue.middlebury.edu/index.php?action=site&site=ipod-ls>.
• Middlebury College—Introduction to iPod Use for Second Language Acquisition, <https://segue.middlebury.edu/index.php?&site=achapin-ipod&section=11594&page=48788&action=site&tag=Languages>.