Duke wasn’t the first university to get serious about podcasting. As noted by Mikael Blaisdell in a March 2006 Campus Technology Article titled "Academic MP3s: Is It iTime Yet?" , Georgia College and State University launched several podcasting programs as early as 2002 . Drexel University’s School of Education is another example, as well as the University of Vermont, Stanford University’s iTunes U, UC Berkeley’s webcast.berkely, and the University of Washington’s Course Casting Service for Teaching and Learning.

Another interesting podcasting initiative can be foundat the Harvard University Extension School, Instructor David J. Malan has created an innovative, 15-week, fully online course -Computer Science E-1: Understanding Computers and the Internet - that includes podcasts of his lectures, and more, that have been made available to the public at large. At the University of Wisconsin - Madison, there’s an extraordinary website that contains lots of great content on podcasting, including information about what it is, how to use it in teaching and learning and how to create and deliver podcasts.  At the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS), Multimedia Education Coordinator Munindra Khaund has a wonderful blog that highlights what’s happening around the world in relation to educational podcasting and vodcasting.

UIS Assistant Professor Michele L. Gribbins embarked on an interesting podcasting pathway, creating brief podcasts each week in two fully online MIS graduate-level courses (Management Information Systems and Technology Management and Organizational Transformation) that she taught during the Spring 2006 semester. She also conducted a trial study by surveying the 49 students who were enrolled in both courses.

Gribbins says that her fully online students often expressed that they felt too far removed from the human aspects of learning. For instance, some students wanted to hear the professor’s point of view over and above what they were getting from reading lectures online. So, podcasting seemed like the next best thing.

Gribbins composed five-minute overview podcasts of each week’s course materials. "I talked about what the learning objectives would be for each week and what they should get from the online course during each specific time period," she explains. She also provided a text-based version of each podcast script.

Gribbins wrote out her scripts before recording, which took her about one hour for each podcast. It took about 15 minutes for her to do the actual recordings, and the UIS Multimedia Education and Production unit edited the podcasts using Audacity. As the semester went on, Gribbins became more familiar with the technology and fumbled less with the microphone, lessening the amount of time it took to record the podcasts.

"The students were not required to access the podcasts," Gribbins adds. "They could read the podcast script, or they could simply ignore both. What I found, however, was that some of the students relied on the audio podcasts as well as the text-based scripts. They actually used both mechanisms, and most of them did not use iPods or other mobile devices; they primarily used their desktops to listen to the content."

Gribbins explains how content of the podcasts was above and beyond what students typically got inside the course management system, including hints about upcoming tests that were presented in the learning objectives she talked about. "When it came time for the midterm, I reemphasized that test questions would be pulled from the learning objectives, which gave them extra incentive to revisit the podcasts."

What were the overall results of Gribbins’ podcasting experiment? Forty-seven of the 49 students who enrolled in Gribbins’ two graduate-level MIS courses answered her survey, which had 18 multiple choice questions (5 pt. Likert scale) and two open-ended questions. When asked if podcasts added to their overall learning experience, 49 percent "agreed," 21 percent answered "neither," 13 percent "strongly agreed," 13 percent "disagreed" and 4 percent "strongly disagreed."