Many instructors are now posting recordings of lectures in their Blackboard courses for later listening or viewing by the students. Some have extended recorded lectures into podcasts with each recorded lecture an episode in the podcast complete with RSS feeds in a Blackboard course so the recordings are kept up-to-date and available for download to a student's mobile device.

Instructors in face-to-face classrooms often ask about capturing their lectures and seek advice on the best video camera to use. “Talking head” video lecture capture is probably one of the worst types of podcasting one can deliver to students. For all the resources and equipment required for a talking head video, a simple audio recording will probably work just as well. 

Podcasting is about delivering information without extraneous content. Seeing someone’s mouth move while listening to the audio is just extra noise. Let’s take advantage of using video including enhanced audio to provide value added content to the podcast by recording the text, images and other visual information not the talking head!

Lectures also tend to be an ongoing linear event with breaks in the stream of delivery, “The hour is up, we will continue tomorrow”. While “cliffhangers” are fine for serialized stories and televisions shows, leaving students hanging until the next podcast episode that may never come, is not the best for learning.

A much better approach is to treat a lecture like a seminar or conference presentation where each session has a definite beginning, middle and ending. Treating each lecture as a standalone presentation better fits the model of podcasts as a series of episodes. 

Tools are readily available for recording narrated Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote presentations as enhanced audio or video podcast episodes. The real challenge is for faculty to reorganize lectures from long linear streams of content into discrete chunks of information, where each lecture can “stand alone” on it’s own as a presentation.

On iTunes U, there are many great examples of lecture podcasts where each lecture is a standalone topic in the subject area. Students can pick which topic interests them or supports their learning. Faculty at other institutions can incorporate these standalone lectures into their own courses without having to chunk or edit several strung out lecture captures. 

There are also some not-so-good examples of lecture podcasts where the instructor obviously just turned on a recorder for each session. Faculty should put themselves in the place of a student and ask “Would I want to listen to or watch this?”

A good lecture podcast actually starts before the term when the instructor is creating the course outline. This is an opportune time to establish discrete topics for each face-to-face lecture session, so that once the session is recorded, it can stand on it’s own without any dependency on the previous or next lecture session. 

By organizing the course outline where each lecture is a discrete recording on a topic, the instructor can record the lecture outside of a live classroom for delivery through an online course at a later time.

When planning to podcast lectures, always remember “presentation capture” not “talking head lecture capture”.