Podcasters Panel: “Long Tail” Professional Development for Online Education Professionals

Audience Level: 
All
Session Time Slot(s): 
Institutional Level: 
Higher Ed
Streamed: 
Streamed
Strands (Select 1 top-level strand. Then select as many tags within your strand as apply.): 
Abstract: 

As podcasting has become more mainstream, a number of podcasts relevant to online educators have arisen. In this session a moderated panel of such podcasters representing different topics, styles, formats, and platforms will address podcasting as professional development. This session promises to be lively and interactive! Come with questions!

Extended Abstract: 

While those of us who follow technology trends in our roles as online education professionals have seen podcasting wax and wane in popularity, 2015 has been touted by Gimlet Media CEO Alex Blumberg as the year that podcasting arrived. While offerings such as “Serial” and “WTF with Marc Maron” have become pop culture phenomena, a number of podcasts relevant to online educators have arisen as well, perhaps exemplifying Anderson’s (2006) “long tail” concept in which even the most niche productions can find an audience.

In this session a moderated panel of higher education podcasters representing different topics, styles, formats, and platforms will address podcasting as professional development. In addition to addressing questions from the live audience, questions will also be crowdsourced ahead of time via social media and through each panelist’s podcast. Some anticipated topics are: the role of podcasting as a source of ongoing professional development; lessons learned in finding one’s voice and in finding an audience; the relationship between audience and format/platform choices; how to get started as a podcasting online education professional; and ideas for building a richer, expanding network of podcasters within the online higher education community.
 

Panelists and the podcasts they represent include:

This panel session will be moderated by Kelvin Thompson, co-host of TOPcast: The Teaching Online Podcast.

Session Outline

  1. Welcome and Introductions [2 mins]

  2. Podcast Profiles [5 mins]
    (brief summary for comparison/contrast from each panelist)

    1. Podcast name

    2. Purpose/audience

    3. Institutionally supported or independent creative effort

    4. Style

    5. Episode length

    6. Frequency of episode release

    7. Age of podcast

    8. # of episodes released

    9. Distribution venue(s)

  3. Moderated Questions and Answers [35 mins]

    1. Responses to Prepared and Crowdsourced Questions

    2. Live Audience Question and Answer

  4. Wrap-Up and Follow-Up Opportunities [3 mins]

Conference Session: 
Concurrent Session 7
Session Type: 
Education Session - Panel Discussion