Using Video Podcast to Enhance Students' Learning Experience in Engineering

The students and faculty today have available to them many technologies that did not exist a decade ago.Such technologies can be great tools for the delivery of course contents to enhance students' learning experience.In this presentation, podcast is employed as an asynchronous online tool in engineering courses to record lectures and supplementary materials.The University podcast server is configured for students to download the episodes of organized lectures and supplementary materials.Mostly, this is done on iTunes, available on both PC and Mac.The podcast contents appear as a playlist on the "Podcasts" directory in iTunes, although students can also download the files and view them in other media players such as Window Media Player.Various modules of supplementary materials were published as podcast episodes in addition to the regular lectures.Such supplementary lectures include clarification of concepts in lectures with necessary materials and media which facilitate the understanding of topics presented in the class, such as problem formulation and solving.Surveys conducted at the end of the semester and analysis are used as an assessment tool to evaluate the effectiveness of integrating podcast to teaching.This pedagogical tool for asynchronous teaching and learning has recently been employed in the online engineering program in the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook.