Fireside Chat

Description

An Austrailian professor uses podcasts as a way to summarize what had been going on in his courses that week. He also uses the weekly updates to bring students up to speed on what they need to focus on for their assignments and how they can integrate what they have been learning so far with what they should be able to do.

Testing, One-two (theage.com.au, October 10, 2005)

Educational Benefits

• Gives students the feeling of personalized attention.
• Allows professors in online courses to create a presence for themselves.
• Gives topics a sense of closure and can be used to introduce upcoming topics.
• Allows for addition of new information that may have resulted from online discussions, questions brought up in class that could not be addressed in the time allotted, or current events/news that may be relevant to the content of the course.