Elizabeth Hopkins
Abstract
Podcasts are seen by many educators as having significant pedagogical potential, especially in higher education. The benefits of students, working in groups, to create their own podcasts, have been described by a number of studies. The podcast creation process is seen as having significant knowledge-creation value and benefits linked to enhanced intellectual engagement with subject matter. This article describes how groups of second year undergraduate students,
on an Education and Subject Studies honours degree course at a small university college in the UK, engaged in a podcast creation assignment. The students were able to demonstrate enhanced levels of academic competencies when the podcasts they created and the reflective journals they produced alongside them were assessed as part of their on-going assessment towards the award of the degree classification. The findings indicate that when compared with the
marks achieved in six other assignments, marked using comparable criteria, the students’ achievement in the podcast
creation assignment was significantly better, ANOVA F=5.378 p<0.001. Content analysis of the students’ reflective journals was used to generate a list of the features of the podcast creation process which may have had an impact on this enhanced student performance and which could be incorporated into other assessment methods.
Hopkins, E. (2012) The potential value of student created podcasts as assessment tools in higher education. Educationalfutures, [online] Vol. 5(1). Available at: https://educationstudies.org.uk/?p=610 [Accessed 19 Apr, 2024].