113. Podcasting for Professional Development

This is a live recording of a session in which we discussed podcasting for professional development on November 21, 2019 at the Online Learning Consortium’s Accelerate Conference. This episode provides a behind-the-scenes look at the Tea for Teaching podcast and an introduction to how to start your own podcast.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: Today we’re recording live from Disney World at the OLC Accelerate Conference. Today’s episode is a behind the scenes look at the Tea for Teaching podcast and an introduction to how to start your own podcast.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together, we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

[MUSIC]

John: Today’s teas are:

Rebecca: Well, I was supposed to have my favorite tea, but my co-host forgot to bring my tea. So I have Awake tea.

John: I specifically said I would be providing the tea. I thought she would be packing it. In the envelope you’ve received, we would have had two teas, but there was a communications gap. But you do have one tea which is one of my favorites. It’s ginger peach black tea from Tea Republic, which is what I’m drinking today.

Rebecca: Like our podcast, we want this session to be conversational. So we encourage you to ask questions throughout the session, rather than leaving them at the end. Ask for clarifications, ask for insider knowledge, or share your own perspective. Judie Littlejohn, who is wearing the Minnie Mouse ears, is assisting us today and has a microphone available to you to ask questions. We ask that before you ask a question though, if you can state your name, and then she’ll also collect your actual written name so we don’t spell it incorrectly in our transcript. Don’t worry, we’ll edit the episode so that we all sound great because we do heavy editing. So, please help us make this session and this podcast episode really useful by participating throughout. And we have a link at the very end to the digital resource and all the things that we’re going to talk about in much more detail if you want to visit that later.

John: So, we thought we’d talk a little bit about how we got started. We’ve been running a teaching center at Oswego for a while. We’ve been working together for I think, five years or so. A couple years ago, we both came to the idea that a podcast might be rather effective. And we both been listening to podcast for a number of reasons. I travel back and forth every summer to Duke and I do a lot of things in SUNY. So I’m driving across the state quite a bit. And podcasts were convenient way of just keeping myself entertained, but also doing some professional development work while driving.

Rebecca: And the summer before we actually decided that we were going to do this podcast in the first place. I had had a baby and I was desperately looking for intellectual stimulation. So, I spent a really long time and many hours listening to every kind of possible podcast, I listened to stories, I listened to research, I listened to teaching podcasts, I listened to Teaching in Higher Ed, Design Education Today, and many, many others. That was all I was doing day in and day out because I couldn’t do anything else having two hands full.

John: At our teaching center, we normally offer about 300 workshops per year. But we noted that a lot of faculty weren’t able to attend because of time conflicts in their schedules, because they were adjuncts working at multiple institutions, or they were commuting over large distances. While we record these workshops as videos, busy faculty often would find it difficult to sit down at a computer and watch a recording of the workshops.

Rebecca: So, when we came back in the fall of 2017, we both were trying to explore ways to address that issue. And we said, well, what about a podcast? And we thought we’d experiment. So, this was all meant to be a small little experiment. The small little experiment started with needing a brand. I’m a designer, a graphic designer… So, everything needs a brand. You got to start there. That’s the only way things can get done. It was kind of challenging to come up with a name.

John: We did actually asked for suggestions from our faculty. And they came up with maybe six or seven names, none of which we both liked.

Rebecca: We had these roundtable sessions on a regular basis that were really popular called Tea for Teaching and at one point, one of our colleagues said, “Well, why don’t you just use that?” And we decided to do that. it was a format that I had brought with me from another institution. So, it’s a name that has traveled with me a bit. So, we decided to do that. But, of course, now that means we’ve had to rebrand our roundtable discussions on campus.

John: This picture up here, and we’ll include a link to that in the show notes [included in slide show in the show notes file], shows a table in our conference room that we use when we did the tea for teaching sessions. And we’ve got probably a couple hundred different types of tea there.

Rebecca: Just a small selection, in case you’re not sure what you might want. For some, there’s too many choices. You spend your whole time trying to decide what it is that you’re going to drink during the discussion. We checked immediately and found out that teaforteaching.com was available… we got it… and then of course, we failed to check all of our social media, and it was not available. So, we use our personal Twitter handles and teaforteaching.com. So, this is a memorable lesson: that you need to make sure that you check all platforms for the name that you’re choosing for something ahead of time. But, of course, we were just doing a little experiment, so it wasn’t going to be a big deal. We decided from the start that we’re going to use an interview format and that meant that we needed to have guests. So, we started initially by reaching out to faculty that were on our campus that we knew that we’re doing interesting things. And, specifically, we started with our teaching award winner, and that was Casey Raymond.

John: He recorded a couple podcast with us. But, our very second guest on the show was Judie Littlejohn, who we knew, but she drove to campus. We were a little nervous about doing something online at first… we were just getting started. So, she visited us and was our second guest. And then our first guest that we didn’t know was three months later, actually, Doug McKee, who’s a host of the Teach Better podcast. He’s also an economist at Cornell, and I had followed him on Twitter, and I saw him post something about the Active Learning Initiative. And so he was on episode 12. And Judie was episode 2.

Rebecca: I think we have another one of our guests in the audience today.

John: And we also have Michelle Miller, who’s been on now for four podcasts as of this week. The most recent one just came out on Wednesday, which was on Neuromyths and Evidence-Based Practices. actually an OLC-sponsored study that originated at OLC a few years ago.

Rebecca: So we’ve had a number of guests that we’ve selected from articles and books in the Chronicle or what have you that we found or tweets that we found interesting and then we pursued… and as our guest list has evolved, we’ve been really excited that we’ve been able to highlight our local faculty in the mix. So, we have both local, regional, national, and international guests. And it’s really nice because we’re able to elevate our local faculty, which was important to us from the beginning. This is also a moment just to remind everyone that this is supposed to be interactive, and no one has asked a question yet.

John: If anyone has any questions at any time, just raise your hand and Judie will get the microphone as close as she can. It’s only a 50 foot cable. If you’re further than that, you can come up to the microphone.

Rebecca: Make sure you ask questions as it relates to the topics that we have a nice dialogue during the actual episode that’s released.

STEVEN BORAWSKI:

Steven Borawski. I’m from Tiffin University. I’ll be the first brave soul, I guess. I just got interested in podcasting… been listening forever. And one of my kids wanted to make one. And so I’m kind of curious, when you started to realize you had something more than just an experiment… when did it get kind of serious for you guys?

John: Within the first month or so when the number of downloads went from being in the dozens to being in the hundreds? We were kind of surprised by that. And by the end of the first month, we had downloads in I think about 35 or 40 countries. And that was not anything we anticipated. We expected originally it would be mostly people within our institution, or within the SUNY system, because we did have people from other SUNY campuses on at first as well.

Rebecca: I think it was also a moment of success when we had some faculty who hadn’t come to any professional development workshops before, who came up to us and said that they had listened to an episode and found it really helpful. As soon as we had one of those interactions it’s like “Big win… we need to keep doing this.” And we both had those kinds of experiences multiple times over. So, it’s been really rewarding in that respect, because it was really for our own local campus is why we did this. It wasn’t to have a bigger audience, although we have a bigger audience than that.

John: And we’re thrilled by that. And that makes it easier to get new guests. And we didn’t want to invite too many guests who were nationally known until we had a reasonable size audience. And once we started getting some nationally and internationally known guests, we felt much more comfortable asking people. But, one of the things that’s really amazed us is how, when we’ve asked people, they nearly always have said yes.

Rebecca: Which is great. [LAUGHTER] From the start, we mentioned that this was going to be an experiment. So, our initial recording studio was just our office… there was just this little tiny table in the corner of our office… We could close the office door. We put a little sign on the outside that says recording in progress. There was a big window and people could kind of see in and see what was happening. And early on we were doing a lot of our recordings, coincidentally I think, in the morning, it wasn’t intentional. And so we didn’t realize that our office is on a major thoroughfare, apparently. So it became really obvious in our recording with Robin DeRosa, which we recorded in the early evening after she gave a workshop on our campus. So, we heard noises like this: [sound of toilet flushing]. The women’s bathroom is located behind our office. [Blender sound] Our office is located adjacent to the cafe. [LAUGHTER]

John: …which is a Starbucks with a grinder and a blender and other noisy things there.

Rebecca: [Sound of a noisy cart rolling past] …that apparently receives deliveries at the exact same time we were recording. So luckily, Robin has a great sense of humor. [LAUGHTER] Because we had to stop every five seconds to allow for all of those noises to occur. So we weren’t getting those constantly in the background. And we were laughing pretty hard by the end because it was getting quite ridiculous.

John: There was one time where Rebecca started a sentence about three or four times and at no point did she get the whole sentence out. And it took me probably an hour to rebuild it from the different fragments of sentences into something that sounded like a complete sentence. And that podcast particularly it took about an hour and a half to record and it became about a 38 minute podcast once we removed all those second starts and other noises. So, that was the problem that we had. One of the first things we did is we made sure that the microphones we use were dynamic mics, rather than condenser mics. They’re not powered, they don’t pick up noises as well from further distances. They’re based entirely on proximity. They’re based on the pressure of the sound wave. So, using a dynamic mic is a really good thing to do if you’re going to set up a podcast and record in the sort of environment we normally have. There are other mics that work really well in a studio and capture sound much more accurately, but we don’t really want all that sound to be captured from our office.

Rebecca: So, we have a small upgrade in our location. And I mean small. We’re in a borrowed space for our recordings, which is an old recording booth for an actual TV station. So, it’s just like a teeny, tiny little closet essentially, that we have strung up all kinds of fabric and things on the walls so that it absorbs some sound.

And there’s a couple of things that we do to make people a little more comfortable. We usually start with a little informal chatter. And literally, it’s that just a little informal conversation to get people to feel a little more comfortable. Most of our guests have never been recorded before, so they’re pretty nervous. And we have now noticed that there’s all kinds of nervous tics that people have. Our favorite one is the rubbing of the pants. [Sound of hand rubbing against fabric] So, it’s like this on your leg constantly while you’re talking, which is really loud when you’re recording. We try to remind folks about some of those nervous habits and just get them to feel comfortable.

John: And the chairs that we borrowed for this room. squeak whenever people turn or fidget and when people are really nervous they turn and fidget a lot. So, we do a fair amount of work on the editing there. [LAUGHTER]

JUDIE: We have a question.

CLIFFORD STUMME: My name is Cliff. I do a little bit of podcasting and online content creation myself. And usually the success metric for that is how much ad revenue am I creating… how much are sponsorships paying? When you guys are working on this, the first thing that comes into my mind is there’s got to be a lot of like professional development or career benefits that go along with it. And maybe this is something you’re going to be talking about later. But, I’d really like to know what kind of personal benefits that you’ve seen from it, whether maybe opportunities to speak or whether you guys just do it for the love of helping the people who listen.

John: We started doing this primarily as an alternative to some of our workshops, although we haven’t really cut back on workshops that much. And, mostly, it’s just been a lot of fun that normally when we do workshops, and we have maybe 10 or 15 people there and we talk about ways of implementing various strategies. We get to hear little bits and snippets of what people are doing. When we’re dealing with a podcast, we sit down and record with them, typically for an hour or so. Sometimes it’s a little bit less, but we get to explore what they’re doing in much more depth.

Rebecca: I think it’s a really great opportunity to get to know so many really great researchers and teachers, both on our campus and nationally. And it’s been a really great opportunity to hear what people are doing. And, I think one of the benefits but also maybe one of the problems with doing this podcast is we have all these really great ideas of things that we want to do in our classes and no time to do it. Because, every time we interview someone, we think, “Oh, wow, let’s do that too.” And I think we’re in a constant cycle of redevelopment, which is good, but at the same time, I get like maybe a little too excited about all the cool stuff we hear about.

John: Yeah, and I do the same. I had students write a textbook last time based on hearing about open pedagogy, and quite a few other projects like that.

KIM BENOWSKI: Hi. I hope you can hear me, I hate talking on microphone. So, I probably would not be the one podcasting, but I work with a media team and whatnot at my university. I’m Kim Benowski from Cornell, and a lot of the media work that I’ve done with faculty… and there’s many faculty that want to come prepared. So, they often want to pre-write a script. They want all the questions and such. I’m wondering how you deal with that. Because in my experience, when we’re making videos, the unscripted is often so much better, more authentic and genuine, especially for a podcast. I was wondering how you handle that and if there are certain things that you do to coach your faculty in advance like, “When you come expect X, Y, and Z.” I ask them not to prepare, if you want to bring bullet points, that’s great, but how do you apply this in the podcast?

John: That’s a really good question. What we do, basically, is we share a Google Doc with them with questions that we’d like to address and we leave it editable so they can modify that if there are things they’d like to emphasize that. We tell them we we want to keep it conversational. Many times people bring notes and sometimes they start reading from the script. And it doesn’t sound quite as good. So, we discourage that. And if they start reading from a script, what do you normally do?

Rebecca: Then I ask a really like, bizarre question that’s not on the script. That’s my job.

John: There have also been a few times when we said “That sounded like you were just reading from the script. Let’s redo that.” One of the things we tend to do to put people at ease, though, is we tell them that because this isn’t live, we edit it thoroughly. And if there’s something you said that didn’t sound good, just say it again, just start over. And we’ve had podcasts that were an hour and a half or an hour and 40 minutes, edited down to 38 minutes with the start overs removed. And we’re not perfect in terms of our presentations, and many of our guests… it’s the first time they’ve done this type of thing. So there’s lots of arms, there’s lots of breathing noises. There’s lots of other things. There’s people who will say “like,” “you know,” “sort of,” “kinda like” all the time, and we just simply remove all that before it goes out.

Rebecca: Yeah, and in case you haven’t noticed we’re not very polished. But, when you listen to the episode that will come out. It’ll sound way more polished.

John: …and shorter.

Rebecca: John’s really good at doing that. But also, if you don’t like talking and being recorded, neither do I. I’m actually quite introverted and really hate this. But, it’s possible you can do it.

TRACY MENDOLIA-MOORE: Tracy with Western University. My question is: “How much time are you investing after the podcast… in the editing? Like, on average… I’m sure there’s more or less, but on average, how much time are you investing in that?

Rebecca: Too much.

John: Too much. On average, it’s probably about 20 hours a podcast.

JUDIE: Would you repeat that, please?

John: On average, it’s probably about 20 hours a podcast.

Rebecca: But, that’s because John is like obsessive. The average person would never edit it to that extreme.

John: But that also includes generating the transcript and cleaning up the transcript as well.

Rebecca: While we’re getting over to the next question, do you want to talk a little bit about our setup and how to deal with some of the noise?

John: If there’s basic noises like a room hum or static, there’s noise filters.

Rebecca: What about people who pop their Ps all the time, john, like your co-host.

John: Yeah… So, if you look at the microphone there, you notice that little thing at the top, that’s a pop filter. so that when people…

Rebecca: …pop their Ps…

John: …like that directly into the microphone, that cuts it down a little bit. And the rest is just cutting out a little bit of the initial tone and dampening it down and softening it a bit.

Rebecca: And if you want to annoy your co-hosts, you make sure that you have lots of annoying sentences that have a lot of pops in them.

John: And another thing we were having problems with at times is when the microphones were on a table like this, people would tap the table or bump the table or drop things on it. So, we have shockmount on the microphone, so that they’re all suspended basically in elastic.

TAYLOR KENDRICK: Hi, this is Taylor Kendrick from Samford University. Thank you all for hosting. I was curious about when your very first podcast went out. You said you had a very good response. What were you doing for getting the word out? “Hey, we’re here.” So someone would listen.

John: We shared it on our local campus email, we’ve got about 1200 people on our email list and we also shared it in a SUNY-wide Facebook Workplace group… so that all of SUNY has access to that. And it also got shared by some people in SUNY, who put it out in news releases, and so on. And from there, it just sort of spread. We’ve posted on Twitter, and we have a Facebook group. And so we shared it on social media, and it just gradually kept getting bigger and bigger.

Rebecca: I mean it started off a little slow, but it has grown pretty rapidly since then. So, we talked a little bit about guests who have never been recorded before and don’t always know how to have their space setup. So, John, do you want to talk a little bit about some of the things that we do for that?

John: Sure. We do send out suggestions to people to use the best mic they have available and to try to make sure they have a solid network connection. We remind people not to be rustling papers when they’re talking, or if they’re using the laptop microphone, which we discourage… but if they’re using their laptop microphone, we ask them not to be typing or scrolling on the laptop when they’re doing it because then you get this dragging sound and so… And some guests, we had to remind 10 or 12 times to do that, because they put some notes up on the computer, and they were scrolling with a touchpad…

Rebecca: …you mean I should do that right now?

John: And that would be an example. But basically, there are other issues. We had a podcast not too long ago where we had someone who was outside, we had someone else who was in a new apartment. So, the person outside we were getting wind gusts coming in and a bird behind them. And the person who had just moved into a new apartment ended up having bare walls and a bare floor and it was like an echo chamber. So, it was an interesting challenge to clean all of that up. There are some nice de-reverb filters you can use to do some of that.

Rebecca: So, we try to remind guests, especially if they’re remote to find a space that maybe has carpeting or some other absorbing materials around to make the space a little bit better. And then also to preferably have a microphone that’s not attached to their headphones so that we don’t end up carrying them through their headphones.

PIERRE BORQUE: I have three questions. I’ll ask them. I can ask them to answer and then the second one you can answer My name is Pierre Borque. I’m from the École de Technologie Supérieure of the University of Quebec provincial system in Montreal. So, my first question is: Do you have any idea of how large your audience is and how do you know that?

John: We get downloads statistics, and we’re generally getting about 3000 downloads a month right now… or a little over, I think the last month it was 3300 or so. So, it’s grown quite a bit.

Rebecca: We also have pretty good traffic on the website, too, but I don’t have the latest stats on that.

PIERRE: My second question is, how many podcasts have you done?

John: We just released our 108th, which is Michelle’s podcast on Neuromyths…

PIERRE: So, how do you generate new content? Are you sort of… the same subjects keep sort of coming back? What’s your strategy for generating new and interesting content?

Rebecca: We find people that we want to talk to. [LAUGHTER]

John: And we also look at Twitter to see what people are posting about. When new books come out, ee look at that… we look at reviews… we look at The Chronicle to see interesting studies that people have done or interesting books that are being posted or talked about or interesting issues. We also look at Inside Higher Ed, and we’re getting more word of mouth where people are recommending people as possible guests to us as well.

Rebecca: I’m pretty sure our attendance at this conference was a scouting adventure. [LAUGHTER]

PIERRE: My third question is for our administrators of which I used to be one up till very recently. Have you identified to your administrators any impact or any benefits in your own institution of hosting this podcast? Has it helped students, faculty, some specific benefits that you’ve cited for your own administrators by hosting this impact? I would like to see some examples.

John: We hear from lots of people about changes they’ve made in their classes and they sometimes talk about how it’s impacted their teaching. The evidence on that in terms of the feedback cycle is not as complete as we’d like. But that’s true with most of the workshops that we’ve been doing. I think the main thing is we’re reaching faculty who we otherwise hadn’t been reaching. And that’s also often times has made them come in for other workshops when they can..

Rebecca: It’s a little challenging to breakdown that specific data from the kind of stats that we can get from the each episode because it just kind of regional data. So it doesn’t tell you: “This is a person from SUNY-Oswego.” But, we’re able to make some guesses about where they’re coming from.

John: We’ve had at least two or three people said that they became interested in doing open pedagogy project because of the podcast we did with Robin DeRosa, and they’re doing them this semester. Actually, two or three people mentioned that specifically, but we have now nine new faculty doing open pedagogy project as part of a SUNY-wide grant. But, I think that podcast inspired at least some of them to consider doing that. And I know Michelle’s podcast on retrieval practice has induced more people to consider doing more work with retrieval practice in various forms. And people do come up to us and tell us about that or send us emails about that. And we do see it in other workshops, where they’re talking about how they’ve implemented some of these things.

Rebecca: And I think our administration really values it. I know that our Provost as well as our Diversity Officer have mentioned it to faculty that they’re considering hiring and those that are newly hired. We even, at new faculty orientation, had quite a few faculty come up to us. It was like, “Oh, we’re so glad to finally meet you.” Because they had been listening, which is a really bizarre experience, right? [LAUGHTER] Wait, you’ve been listening? What do you mean? Who are you? [LAUGHTER]

John: And it’s sometimes really strange at a conference when people come up and start talking to you about something. And then it will be obvious that they’re talking about a podcast episode. They listen, and they feel they know us because they’ve been listening to us for 100 hours or more.

Rebecca: …and our voices are familiar., yeah.

MICHELLE BAKER: Hi, my name is Michelle. I’m from Penn State University. And I’m wondering, on the technical side of things, what software do you use for all of the editing that you’ve been talking about? And my follow up question to that is you’ve talked a lot about reducing sound. I’m wondering do you also add sound effects and music and if you do, where do you find that?

John: In terms of adding it, and that’s an easy one. We licensed some music from one of the sites that that provides these sources. And that’s recorded and just fixed. And we just do that. That’s the intro and outro. In terms of editing, we use Adobe Audition for most of our editing. And we do have a campus license for that. In terms of things related to software. When we have remote guests, it’s a little more challenging, which is why we postponed that a little bit when we first started, because our network was not always stable, and our guests often don’t have stable network. So, we do end up with some drops of data or sometimes people disconnecting, or the quality of the voice just fades away. So, what we used to do, up until about three or four weeks ago, we were using Zoom for Voice over IP. And on our local side, we were using Audio Hijack, so that our voices would be recorded in our local mixer directly from our microphones, but we’d take the incoming voice from our guests as a separate channel so we’d be able to edit our guests and us separately, so we normally sounded pretty clean (unless there were carts going by or toilets flushing), but the guests audio varied a bit depending on network speed and noise and other issues. We just recently moved to SquadCast. And the first time we used it was with a podcast with Kristen Betts and Michelle. What that does basically…

Rebecca: Thanks for being a guinea pig.

John: …it’s a double-ender recording session. It’s a web based app. It records each end of the podcast separately to the local computer and streams it in the background. So, you get the highest quality audio from each end of the podcast. And you can have up to, I believe four different sites connecting at once. We used it with 3 in that one. So, Kristin Betts was on one channel, Michelle was on another, and we were on a third,

Rebecca: It starts getting a little complicated when you have more than four people. It’s like hard to follow who’s talking. We’ve done a couple where there’s a few more guests than that, and it’s really challenging to edit. It’s challenging to listen to. So, I think for us kind of the max. As we mentioned earlier, we started off as an experiment. We’re well over 100 episodes now. So, clearly, it’s not an experiment anymore. It’s a thing we do. [LAUGHTER] And probably no one’s more surprised about this than I am. And John just keeps saying “It’s growing, it’s growing, we got to keep doing it.”

John: And we have had pretty steady growth. Each month it’s gone up. We’ve been over 3000 for the last four months. And we’re certainly on track for that, again, we have listeners in every state. I remember, there was that last state, it took about five or six months to get to but we finally got it. I think it was… Arkansas.

Rebecca: It was. Yeah.

John: Arkansas was the last state. And when we finally got that person, it was great. And now we see a teaching center there actually has this on a website. We’ve got notification of that recently. So we’re now getting a reasonable number of downloads from every state and we have over 100 countries.

Rebecca: Yep. And I think a lot of the evidence that we had that we mentioned earlier is really anecdotal and when faculty reach out to us or send us messages, we try to keep all of those stash those stories and things that we have those that we can report back on. We also are really proud that from the very, very beginning, our podcast has been accessible… meaning that we made sure that the website itself is accessible but also that we have had transcripts since the very first episode. We think that’s really important and we’ve maintained that and we continually improve the site and do things to increase the accessibility. Originally, we were using YouTube for those transcripts, and then a lot of human editing from there. But now we’re using otter.ai, which actually comes with some capitalization and punctuation. [LAUGHTER]

John: Yeah, because YouTube was really good in terms of its accuracy. But you just got a stream of words, and it didn’t identify the speakers. It didn’t put in punctuation or capitalization, and it was a real pain, just adding those things. Otter.ai is slightly less accurate, but putting in all the punctuation and putting in the capitalization… and identifying speakers. It recognizes my voice, Rebecca still has to be trained again, so that it will recognize her. But our guests come in as an identified speaker 1, unidentified speaker 2, and it’s really easy to clean that up. It makes it much easier and it’s probably cut 30% off of the transcript editing time.

Rebecca: and I think otter.ai is free for 50 hours a month.

John: 50 hours a month… per Gmail account. And if you have multiple Gmail accounts that makes it pretty large,

LUVON HUDSON: Hi. Luvon Hudson from Central Piedmont Community College. And my question is simply… I don’t know if you can recommend, or if you have advice around, maybe like a sweet spot, if there is such thing, for the length of a podcast, a lot of my faculty don’t really like to sit long. So, I don’t know if that translates into the same thing for podcasts as well. I’ve heard you say 38 minutes twice. I don’t know if that’s maybe your sweet spot, because I do know that transcription and things like that kind of add into that backend work. So, do you recommend that or is that even a factor? Is it more just around the content and the quality of what you’re talking about?

John: It varies a bit with that, but we generally schedule hour-long recording sessions. Sometimes, they go a little bit longer, but we try to keep the actual recording to an hour, including some conversation in the beginning, some setup and so forth. Most of our episodes are between 30 and 40 minutes. We do have longer ones, but the longer ones in general had a lot of really rich content that we just couldn’t cut or we wouldn’t want to cut. I don’t know what the optimal length is. And that’s one of the questions, actually, in the survey. We’re curious. But I know, I tend to prefer not to listen to podcasts that go over an hour. For me, most of the podcasts I enjoy the most are between 20 and 50 minutes, because that’s nice for a reasonable commute.

Rebecca: I’d say we have a lot of faculty that commute and they come from two different cities into Oswego and the shorter one is like a 30 or 40 minute commute. So trying to keep to that one I think is key for our local audience.

John: I should say that one thing that I do is I listened to all my podcasts initially at 1.5 times and now I listen to them at double speed. And it’s really a little disconcerting when we talk to someone who I hear on other podcasts, and all of a sudden they’re really slow speakers because I’ve gotten used to hearing him at double speed.

MARIE BAMAS: Hi, I’m Maria from Middle Tennessee State University. When you guys started really getting into this and refining it and making what you had started out with better in terms of like the software or the hardware and your content? Did you go to other conferences? Did you do most of your research on the interwebs? I mean, like, how did you refine it and get all the information and kind of like, make it as best as it could be like what it is today?

John: That’s a good question. All the above, except we haven’t really had that much formal training on this. Mostly, if I’m noticing a noise problem when I’m editing, I just do a search on the web, or I look at the help in Adobe Audition, or I’ll look at some of the LinkedIn learning discussions of how to do these things. There are so many YouTube videos on removing pops and clicks and other things. And there’s YouTube videos on pretty much every type of thing and I use those a lot when I’m trying to deal with a different problem that I haven’t dealt with before. Adobe Audition keeps getting better. One of the things that happens is, we mentioned the first podcast that were relatively short. The very first one, I think it probably took maybe an hour to edit because I wasn’t hearing a lot of the noise there. One of the things that happens is, the more you edit these things, the more you notice. The noise in the office we had lived with for years. So, it was just background noise that we didn’t notice. But when you start hearing it from headphones, and you start using better headphones, you can hear that noise much more clearly. And so you just become more adept at observing things and cleaning them up.

Rebecca: I think in terms of content, we got some yeses from people that we were surprised said yes. So, then we just started asking more people that seemed like a stretch, and then we kept getting yeses. So now it’s like nobody’s a stretch, we’ll just ask. Sometimes we get ignored. Sometimes we get yeses. Very rarely do we get nos. So it’s been really great.

TAYLOR: Hi, this Taylor again from Samford University. Going back to the issue of what your shows are about and your content, was your original idea to do PD (professional development) specific just for your university or with particular subjects or was it always “These are people we want to talk to.” Because I’ve thought about doing PD specific for my university on topic versus guest.

Rebecca: Yeah, it specifically has always been about teaching and learning. So, we run the Teaching and Learning Center on our campus, and so it was meant to substitute for some faculty instead of going to workshops and things that this would be a supplement or an alternative in the way of being more accessible in alternative format for folks who might need it. I think it’s always focused on being a professional development specifically for faculty, although I think we have a mix of faculty, staff, and administrators who listen,

John: But, it’s primarily interviews with people who are very skilled in the specific thing that we’re talking about. So, we find people who are doing interesting things, interesting applications, or interesting techniques, and then we interview them. So, it is professional development, but it’s generally professional development using experts on that particular topic.

Rebecca: And think we tried to find a mix between people who are doing research on particular topics as well as faculty who are implementing things in their classes so that we have examples as well as research to back some of those things up.

JUDIE: Do we have time for one more?

Rebecca: Yeah, I think we have time for one more.

LUVON: Typically at our school, we normally have to go through our communications and marketing department. Do you have any issues having to do that?

John: We didn’t tell anybody. We just started doing it. [LAUGHTER] And by the time we had a national and international audience, they were actually pretty pleased with it. So, I don’t think our Dean or Provost discovered it until we had been doing it for a few months. And they started hearing about it from other people.It’s gotten some good favorable reviews from the administration, but I think we found it easier just to do it without going through those channels.

Rebecca: Well, and then, actually, our communications office did a feature story on our hundredth episode. So I think we’ve got buy in now.

John: Yeah.

Rebecca: After 100 It’s a thing.

John: Yeah. So we did it. It worked and then we got the buy in.

Rebecca: Always. [LAUGHTER]

John: We may edit that part out .[LAUGHTER] But we did have our Provost on the podcast.

In that document that we shared with you, we have details on setting up your own in terms of microphones, hardware, low-budget ways of doing this more expensive ways of doing this. So, there’s a lot of resources there. And if there’s anything we can help you with, just send us an email and we’d be happy to give you some assistance.

Rebecca: And so we always wrap up by asking, what’s next? John, what’s next?

John: I’m going to DIsney World… I’m going to continue with the conference, go back and work with my students for the rest of the semester.

Rebecca: And I’m going to be on sabbatical in the spring. That’s what I’m going to do… and so look forward to some recordings with some guest hosts while I’m away. I’ll still be recording some, but we’re hoping that some of our previous guests will come in and guest host while I am away.

[MUSIC]

[APPLAUSE]

John: Thank you.

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.