Dr Bill Ashraf, a senior lecturer in microbiology at Bradford University has moved to podcast only lectures for his students in an aim to free up more time for smaller group sessions with his students.

[source article from the BBC]

I have a very minor fear that this will exclude a few students who might not have internet access, though in this day and age that is very unlikely as universities have excellent computing facilities. In addition I am assuming that Dr Ashraf is providing text transcripts for deaf students, perhaps if the method of podcasting becomes more popular among lecturers then we will see the universities offering transcription services to their faculty.

Despite this minor fear I think that podcast lectures are an excellent idea. As a student at Nottingham University my Computer Science lecture groups were often in the 100+ audience size range and were most often very much a one way experience. Any questions from the audience were usually generated from the same select group and more often than not only served as a distraction from the main message of the lecture. This sort of questioning can easily be moved into internet based class discussion groups or the small group sessions that could be enabled by saving on lecture time.

The possibility for opening up education across geographic bounds is also immense, one of the habits i have got into in the last few months is listening to podcasts on the way into work. I have found that the University Channel provided by Princeton offers many excellent guest lectures. Another great source if you’re interested in business in anyway is the Stanford entrepreneurial thought leaders lecture series. Guest lecturers are typically CEOs of large corporations or experienced startup leaders, more often than not in the technology field.

Hopefully other university professors will begin to publish their lecture material externally, frequently Professors are only known for being great researchers. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if they could be world renown for being great teachers too…