2 Samuel Hickcox – Student Outreach Through OER Podcast

OER Podcast:

PCC Student Aster and I talk about OER and their textbook cost saving benefits!

Introduction:

The goal and purpose of this Open Educational Resources (OER) podcast is to introduce Pima Community College (PCC) students on how OER can save them money on textbook costs with all the constant fees and charges in college. Through talking with a current PCC student, Aster, and being a former PCC student myself, I ask questions to Aster to provide the perspective from a current student who has experienced the benefit of OERs compared to the required textbooks that courses recommend. The audio is a quick listen (4 minutes run time), which can be broken up to use for clips to market on social media or any other digital platform.

OER internship site supervisor Chelsea and I thought that it would be a fun and creative idea to create a podcast for the Fall 2024 semester with them being such a major resource for receiving and providing information recently. Chelsea reached out to one of her PCC students (Aster) who has a bit of background knowledge in OERs and agreed to be a participant in the podcast. A script was then typed out with five questions, which will be transcribed below. After sharing the script of questions with Aster, the two of us edited it to make it cleaner and more impactful before getting underway with the recording.

Notes on the process:

Finding a student to talk with on the podcast was a fairly easy endevear for myself because Chelsea had a student in mind from her honor’s class that had little knowledge of OERs. Had she not had a student in mind or they weren’t available to participate, it may have been more challenging finding one as eager as Aster was. Some ways to find student’s to participate in a podcast relating to OERs can be through contacting faculty, social media (Linkedin), and/or campus bulletin boards at the library. Students that frequent the library for its resources may have a knowledge of OERs, and if they don’t, they are likely interested in hearing more about it.

The OER podcast audio was recorded on an iPhone’s Voice Memo app and thus was downloaded to be available on Apple Music and Apple Books. This is one of the issues that was encountered in the process of making the podcast as it doesn’t seem to be as accessible to other popular platforms such as Spotify or any other audio file. Aster and I recorded the podcast in a study room at the Downtown Pima Community College campus where we did two takes. The majority of the first recording made the final audio, but the final question was edited in GarageBand into the original version for creator preferences.

After doing further research, the following procedures allow the audio file to be downloaded as an .mp3 file from the GarageBand app (which is free with every Apple product):

Click the Share menu > Select Export Song to Disk > Choose the file format >Select the destination for the file

The final product is better than I expected having never done a podcast before. Had I another chance to make an episode with a student, I would have used Aster’s tip of holding the mic (iPhone) next to my mouth instead of in front of it to avoid plosives and pops. Many times throughout the questions I asked, the audience can hear exaggerated sounds from my p’s and t’s. Aster’s audio was smooth and clear, and this is something that can easily be corrected with another take.

It is possible for future OERs to further the podcast with new episodes as their own project. Talking to a PCC student was one version of an episode that provides beneficial information for listeners. Other guests that can be featured and interviewed can be: students with no awareness of OERs; faculty that use OERs to teach their students; faculty that don’t use OERs and can be made aware of them; librarians. Each of these guest speakers offer different perspectives that can be important to hear from.

It is also possible to further the podcast by adjusting the topic on OERs. The episode I recorded focused on a student’s vague awareness of them and its benefits to their education, but it can also be made to focus on other topics such as social justice, faculty benefits, and library benefits. It is important to explore the many ways OERs benefit the world of education. As Pima Community College’s mission mentions, any person can receive quality education for a reasonable price that Universities can’t offer, which is where OER can help remove textbook costs.

Another issue that was encountered that can be improved by future OER interns is the marketing of the podcast. Had I had a full understanding and vision of the podcast earlier in the semester, I believe it could have been marketed much more effectively to the community through social media posts and posters at Pima campuses using a QR code and link letting students know that it offers information about saving money on textbooks. I believe that if it were made aware of online and at the library where students are most likely to be interested in saving money on textbooks (because both of those places are where students like myself go looking for .pdf and free versions of required class textbooks). Chelsea has also given the episode an audience through D2L’s announcements and OERizona where they can feature it on their own podcast series.

Conclusions:

The OER podcast was a fun and informative project to create. It provides the opportunity to learn how to create a podcast, which is something I’ve been interested in learning since seeing them all over the internet. The project also provided more practice and knowledge on OERs through creating, sharing, and reading them. It also created the opportunity to meet many people in the educational field who are eager to learn and share their knowledge of OERs.

If I could do this OER internship again, I would do so because there are always more OERs to read and create. The team that I worked with were inspirational and motivational with their own passions for OERs. Just because I will no longer be in the internship program, I have the confidence and motivation to create my own OERs and see how they can thrive in the Library and Information Science and academic fields. The podcast is something that I am proud of creating and I hope that someone is determined to create their own episodes and improve it.