OK, so podcasting has been around for quite some time now. These days they are available in both an audio and video format. I would be surprised in fact if any of you were not subscribed to at least one podcast by now. So todays post looks at how we can deploy your podcasts using Moodle.

To start off with, I will assume we have a couple of un-initiated users here who are still asking “What exactly do they mean by podcast?’, so lets have a look at a quick analogy to help describe what a podcast is.

Podcasts are like Magazine Subscriptions. With a magazine subscription you register for a magazine (podcast) and then every so often the publisher (podcaster) will send one to your house. You then decide when you want to read that magazine or you can just throw it away because it no longer interests you. You can also cancel any subscription at any time.

Now that is a very generic description, but hopefully gets the point across. Rather than being something you and a user have to go get, a subscribed podcast is sent out to the user automatically issue by issue. You do not however need an iPod to listen/view a podcast. All you need is an application to allow you to subscribe and receive the said podcast, I usually recommend iTunes.

So, now the basics are out of the way, lets talk about why we would deploy a podcast through Moodle.

Advantages for the Student

First is the usability factor. Not every student (no matter what the age group) will be comfortable with podcasting and this may prove to be a barrier to entry. So by deploying the podcast through Moodle we in fact give the students two options to view. The traditional method of using an external podcast application will still work for those comfortable with the technology, but for the rest they can view the podcast as if it was a traditional Moodle media resource.

Advantages for the Teacher

To talk techie for just a second, to create a podcast involves not just the creation of the audio or visual media (that is an issue I’ll let you work out for yourselves) but they also need to create an XML file for users to link to to form the subscription process. If that sounds like Greek have no fear, you are not alone. There are many programs out there for PC and mac that facilitate this, by why teach another program when you can use a tool like Moodle which the teacher is already familiar with. Also by using Moodle and its course based design you can have numerous teachers all updating the one podcast activity.

So…Enough Chatter…How do we do it?

I’m so glad you asked. Many traditionalists will tell you that you can use Moodles forums with “RSS” turned on to achieve this. I find this solution to be clunky for the users and not very effective. So instead I am going to use the iPodcast tool created by Thomas Dolsky and can be downloaded from here. If you are just a teacher, you will need an administrator to install this for you onto your Moodle site as it is not a standard tool shipped with Moodle. There is also additional support in the Moodle forums.

As usual it is easier to demonstrate the features of this code rather than try to describe…so details of the iPodcast module are shown in the video below. Please be sure to add your thoughts in the comments.

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This post is tagged demo, ipodcast, Moodle, multimedia, Podcast, vodcast, web2