Implementation 7: University of Melbourne - Medicine
Student-generated podcasts
This implementation was a semester long project in which a podcasting system was created to support peer learning in a problem based medical curriculum. Students could create short podcasts that communicated their understandings, difficulties or opinions about the weekly clinical problem under investigation and they were also able to comment on and rate others' podcasts. 319 second year medical students were invited to participate in this study, although only a subset decided to do so (approximately one-fifth of students).
A podcasting system was developed to support students' investigation of the problem of the week and their self-directed learning. The system, called Problm, consisted of a web database application, which allowed students to create, upload, publish, subscribe to, listen to, rate and comment on podcasts. Students were asked to create podcasts in one of three areas:
- Aha! I get it! - podcasts that offer an explanation of some aspect of the POW (problem of the week).
- Huh? I don't get it. - podcasts that express a difficulty about the POW.
- IMHO. In My Humble Opinion. - podcasts that offer a comment on something related to the POW or course in general.