2 Chapter One: Developing the Podcasting Course
Dee McKinney
Chapter 1: Developing the Podcasting Course
We began work on WILD5950 (Special Topics in Wildlife: Podcasting) eight months before the 16-week course launched in fall 2022. Central to our goals were guiding questions:
- How will we teach this course through active learning methods?
- How do we nurture adult learners?
- Can students create both a short and long podcast in 15 weeks?
- What resources[1] do we need? What about the students?
- How can we apply project management ideas in course development?
- What does the class outline look like?
- What are we missing?
We used a pattern of work familiar to most instructional design teams; the subject matter experts (Jack and Gino) created content, while the instructional designer (Dee) laid out the course and considered learning design principles. Our two key theoretical underpinnings were andragogy and active learning.
Andragogy
To us, andragogy means the art and science of good teaching for adult learners. We considered Malcolm Knowles’ (1980) six principles of adult learning for the theoretical foundations of the course:
Learner’s need to know: Adults want to know the reason why they are learning something and learning must be purposeful.
Prior experience of the learner: Adults use prior experiences as a basis and foundation for learning. They use this experience to build connections between what they already know and new information they encounter.
Self-concept of the learner: Adults want to be responsible for their education and involved in the decision-making processes.
Readiness to learn: Adults want to learn information that has immediate relevance. It should be applicable to their lives and their work.
Orientation to learning: Adults want to engage in learning that is problem-centered and goal-oriented.
Motivation to learn: Adults are internally motivated to learn and they are self-directed learners.
We incorporated these principles in specific ways:
- Student choices (topic, group members)
- Reasons for scaffolded work (to demonstrate the multi-step approach to each step of podcasting)
- Encouragement to choose podcast topics relevant to the students’ interests
- Aside from deadlines, freedom to direct process procedures
Active Learning
Active learning is an essential component of graduate and undergraduate education in the 21st century university. The Center for Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University describes active learning as strategies that engage students in the construction of their own knowledge, with higher-order thinking, reflection, and metacognition. The University of Georgia identified active learning in the undergraduate classroom as its Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) for the 2022 SACSCOC (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges) reaffirmation. This, plus our own teaching philosophies, made active learning central to our plan for this course.
With an active learning approach, stude