There was an emergency shift in how instructional material is delivered during the coronavirus outbreak in March 2020, when the entire world was in lockdown due to the pandemic. The traditional face to face instructional delivery had to be radically changed into virtual delivery almost overnight for instructors and instructional designers. Even the online delivery of instructional content seemed to be challenging for some institutions and instructors. Because many of you have faced connectivity challenges depending on which country you are located in, it made sense to deliver instructional content and lecture material in a way that would enable you to access the material through the Learning Management System (LMS) at your own convenience and through your own devices.
The University of Skaro decided to train and encourage you to record your lectures in short and engaging audio recordings in a podcast format. Below is a short video released by the Center of Learning at University of Alberta, explaining what podcasts are and how they can be used as an instructional tool, listing the many advantages and reasons why more institutions are leaning towards using podcasts:
By the end of Lesson 2, you will be able to prepare and develop a podcast for your area of expertise and pedagogy with the student learner in mind, by developing scripts, recording podcasts, and editing podcasts to be presented to learners.
To begin this lesson, you will modify a segment of one of your existing lectures into a script, delete redundant material, and prepare short, engaging content. You will be able to identify and highlight important content in your lectures, categorize them and subdivide them into topics. You are essentially designing your lecture content in a chronological manner and at the same time you are producing a script for your audio podcast recording in a short and engaging manner. You can learn about limiting the length of your audio recording using a word limit from examples provided, such as Average Words Per Minute Speaking (15 Experts Examples), to get an understanding of how an effective script is written for podcasts, and how many words per minute can make an audio podcast engaging and well-paced for your listeners.
There are many advantages to using podcasts, and one of the most important is that it addresses the needs of diverse learners, increasing accessibility, and making lecture content available to them to review multiple times. The following video provides an introduction on how to make and use podcasts as educational tools, and provides an overview of how a podcast uses scripts and catchwords to keep the learners' engagement at a peak.
Completion of this module's assignment assesses your fulfillment of Instructional Objective 1. For this assignment, you will work on creating a short and engaging script, using part of one of your existing lectures. Keep in mind that you will be recording your script during Module 2. Additionally, we have provided the following user guide in Google Slides to help you convert your lecture segment and create your script.
Tasks to complete:
Create a sample of part of your segmented lecture content in a Word document, with Tracked Changes activated to reflect modifications.
Create a sample podcast script to demonstrate the modifications you made, staying within the word count appropriate for a 10 minute recording.
Submission instructions:
Combine the two files together into one Word document.
To submit your file, click on the Submit assignment button in the bottom right corner of this page.
This assignment will be graded based on the rubric provided at the bottom of this page.