Podcasts Link Biology Students to Learning
Profiles in Success: Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN — At Purdue University, students are getting an earful — and an eyeful — of learning. Seeing the steady increase in the number of students sporting iPod ear-buds around the campus, Laurie Iten — a professor of biological sciences — and her colleagues found an ideal way to connect students with their studies. Now, thanks to Purdue’s Department of Biological Sciences series of “Rewind-Flash Forward” podcasts that preview and review key concepts, Iten and other colleagues know they have an important teaching tool. And every day, more and more students get plugged in.
With the approach of Purdue’s “Teaching and Learning with Technology” conference in March of 2006, Iten — along with Academic Advisor and Instructional Coordinator Timothy Kerr and Director of Scientific Illustration Rodney McPhail — began brainstorming innovative ways to incorporate technology like podcasting into her courses. The sight of hundreds of students listening to an iPod prompted an obvious connection to recording and playing back lectures. But Iten and her department’s IT staff wanted more.
“With a video iPod I have [students’] eyes, and with an audio-only iPod I have their ears. Either way, the opportunity to have their undivided attention is something I just can’t pass up.”
— Laurie Iten, Professor of Biological Sciences, Purdue University
“That just would have been new technology replacing the same old cassette tapes of lectures students had been checking out for years,” Iten asserts. “Our greatest challenge is to get students to make the connections between what they’ve learned and what they are learning within a course, or between courses, and to really use technology to improve teaching and learning. They tend to compartmentalize each course; we want them to build on their knowledge and skill-base, and understand how theory and practice relate. The podcasts are the perfect way to help students connect the dots.”
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