Surveying the Open Podcast Landscape and Finding our Niche: Blog #1 for the Open Podcasting Project. |

Authors: Verena Roberts and Nicole Neutling

This is the first blog for the Open Podcast Project for the #GO-GN Fellowship. The podcast research project will provide:

an opportunity to encourage multiple voices in sharing their perspectives on the podcasting creation process
a collection of recommended open podcasting software and hardware links and resources
a collection of potential ideas for podcasting in learning design as digital content and/or student activities and;
The foundation to support building open podcast learning communities and networking.

While we realize that our project may appear to be quite large, our focus will be the potential of podcasting in open learning contexts.

We will be exploring our project in stages.

Stage 1: Discovering the Open Podcasting Landscape by Curating and collecting resources, Completing interviews, Clarifying our essential inquiry question
Stage 2: “Finding our “Niche”, Choosing a podcasting template/ style, Choosing and contacting guests
Stage 3: Creating and Editing podcasts
Stage 4: Completing podcasting OER resources collection, research connections and data analysis, webinars, presentations (knowledge mobilization)

This blog will focus on Stage 1 and the beginnings of Stage 2 of the Podcast Research Project

Over the last month, we have used an inquiry approach to answer some of our big questions about podcasting in order to create our essential question for the project.

We presented our potential research at a #GO-GN webinar (June 9). This was an opportunity to share our research project with our community and to gain valuable feedback into the #GO-GN Fellowship process. Not only did we present our current research, Chrissi Nerantzi and Virginia Rhodes presented their completed fellowships.

We have completed numerous interviews (see the amazing names and links for more information at the end of this blogpost) with podcasting experts within the open community, we collected notes which included descriptions of the podcasting process and recommended podcast links and resources.

Nicole Neutzling and I have met weekly to chat about the interviews, the digital links and resources. We focused on how each person described their podcasting experiences and process and the potential for podcasting in multiple learning contexts.

We have spent the last few weeks reviewing our interview notes in order to come to an agreement about emerging themes from the experts, which resources and links were recommended most often and why and what current literature suggests for our inquiry into podcasting. This research also includes figuring out which “niche audience” our podcast series can serve and why. Discovering our open learning podcasting niche has proven to help guide our research, personal and professional growth throughout this project.

As we finish our interviews, we are asking the community to consider completing the following anonymous online survey to help us better understand the potential of podcasting in learning contexts.

Here is the Survey link. Please complete the survey by: Sunday, July 18, 2021.

This blog post is dedicated to the following podcasters who gave their time and energy to helping us get this started:

As we are exploring podcasting, Dr. Robert’s had the idea of integrating audio into our blog posts. This audio serves to help us experiment with the different tools we will need to use to create this podcast and allow us to interweave both audio with written reflection.

This is Nicole’s reflection of the last month:

Nicoles’ Reflections (June, 2021)

Below is a list of podcasting resources that have been shared to date:

Tools:

Audacity (we are currently looking into Audacity’s use of data).
Zencastr
Vocaroo
Online Voice Recorder

Tips and Tricks:

Blogs:

Podcasts:

Education:

The Higher Ed Podcast

Great Storytellers:

Laura’s Podcasts:

Martin’s Podcast

25 Years of Edtech

Terry’s Podcast:

Getting Air

Stephen’s Podcast/

VoicEd Radio

Tim Carsons’s Podcasts:

Research Articles:

Pasquini, L. A. (2018). Pod Save Higher Ed: A Resource Guide To Inspire Storytelling & Podcast Making in Higher Education. figshare. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.7228223.v1

Cover image by Mohammad Metri at Unplash