Why I Think Audio Is The Future Of Higher Education

And why I created a course that teaches students how to create a short narrative podcast...which can be used by any teacher, anywhere, even when they know nothing about podcasting or journalism

In the first lecture I delivered last year to a group of mostly second-year students from Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson U), I asked the students to raise their hands if they had a smart phone.

Everyone who could be bothered raised their hand. 

Then, I went in with my follow up: “Ok, how about a podcast app on that phone…how many of you have one of those?” I asked, holding my iPhone up.

Only a small handful of them raised their hands. Many reached for their phones and did a quick search. 

About half the class stared at me blankly, so I clarified: “You know, like Spotify, or Apple Podcasts, or GooglePlay.”

This time some more people nodded along…right, Spotify does that too.

And then I asked them to raise their hands if they had listened to a podcast that day. Out of a class of around 80 students, less than eight raised their hands. 

How about in the last week?…a few more…What about the last month…one or two more hands. 

How about ever? I asked, hoping to lower the bar so that more of these students would feel included. A few hands went up, some tossing from side to side, as in, maaaaybe.

I will admit this surprised me

Here I was at a second-year class getting ready to teach them how to make a short narrative podcast as their major term assignment. My working hypothesis heading into this moment was that they would all have a basic literacy of what a podcast is, and we could start from a less-than-basic starting point. 

In the room was a very diverse GenZers, at a medium-sized university in downtown Toronto—a big and cosmopolitan city roughly the size of Chicago. Of the 45,000 TMU undergraduates, 140 different countries are represented. These students in the room were from the Environment and Urban Sustainability program, which meant they could either be at the beginning of their studies, or have circled back around with a new focus as a mature student. 

They weren’t, I should clarify, Journalism or Communications students…students whom I would assume already had a grasp of audio journalism. I was brought into the classroom to teach them how to make a short podcast for their major term assignment; while the professor taught the academic material, I taught them how to make a short narrative podcast. And by the end of the term, it was quite stunning to see how well they embraced the task, despite zero background in media creation.  

But as I stood in that classroom on that day

I realized this generation of students is more “video-forward,” so I thought I should explain the basics of audio recording.

So I polled them again: Did anyone have audio recordings on their phones (from family events, or funny moments, etc)? No one put up their hand. 

But then when I asked if any of them had video recorded, almost everyone nodded yes. 

“Soooo,” I said. “Guess what. You do have audio recordings. Just scrub the video.”

Their eyes lit up.

Ohhhhh. Right. Audio is the part of video that you don’t see. Hmmmmm.  

This moment got me thinking about what the best way is to introduce audio to these very video-focused students

How could I help them to see what audio folks know in their bones: that we are as fundamentally shaped by sound and story as we are in shaping it for others to perceive?

With this in mind, I set out to provide a primer to what the history of podcasting is, from the beginning of time, until now.

The beginning of time you might say?

Well, yes. 

But not exactly in that way of audio journalists trailing around the dinosaurs with headphones and a microphone [this will always conjure the comedy sketch from Portlandia when Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein embed themselves in a police briefing room to hear about the most recent crime].

This idea was first shared with me by

Rob Rosenthal

when I attended one of his Transom Travelling Storytelling Workshops. As we sat huddled together in a livingroom on the quaint island of Catalina, CA, Rob leaned in and said, something like:

“Now, I don’t want to get all woo-woo on you here, but the thing about storytelling is that it’s something we’ve always done. Sitting around the campfire, listening to stories. This is as old as time. And maybe that’s why podcasting works, why people love it this much….it’s just part of our DNA.”

And as soon as he said it, it was like fireworks going off in my mind. It just made sense. We are programmed to listen to stories. It’s literally part of what made humans who they are.

So beginning at the same premise, I did a bunch more research

I leaned into the whole concept of what broadcasting is, and penned a short history of podcasting in under 11 minutes.

It begins with a reminder of all the first “texts” that we think of: Homer’s Odyssey, The Torah, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Quran, the original Greek Tragedies, Turtle Island and other Indigenous storytelling traditions…these weren’t “written” down. They were stories. Passed on from person to person, family to family, Courier to King, actor to audience. 

Sure, I allow, many of these are now considered religious texts. But when they began, when they were created, they weren’t written down. That didn’t start on a mass production level until the early 1400s when the Gutenberg Printing Press was invented.

When they began, they were stories, that were shared around a campfire, throughout the Roman Empire, in a Court, at an amphitheater…this was where it all began.

Then I give a short history of broadcasting, ie the ability to transmit from one point to many points, because you cannot understand the importance of podcasting without seeing where it fits into that ecosystem.

My point is this: broadcast began with audio. In 1897, the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi sent his first AM radio signal over the Atlantic. This radical invention paved the way for radio broadcasting.

And this idea of sending radio signals turned out to be very popular, and within a couple of decades, radio was it…for news, sports, entertainment, music, murder mysteries.

Radio remained king until the 1950s, despite the invention of televisions. Why? Not enough programming, expensive hardware, not widely available in remote locations. 

And because of this, it was early radio that defined the patterns of entertainment, news dissemination, and of course made music popular…and here please visualize each of the important industries that were created alongside each of these folds. Radio decided it all.

When television began to move into the dominant role sometime in the 1970s, radio retreated into a different place. That’s when public radio flourished…the ‘golden age’ of public radio began right as television took off in the 1980s. And here’s a good time to remind that both the early radio formats (primarily the serialized shows), and then the public radio format (which created and then defined the early podcast era) are literally baked into the podcast industry today. They are so invisible there that we can easily forget their origins.

Television still played a role in the podcast industry, just in a different way. Remember those giant tv satellite dishes from the 1980s that were five feet in diameter? Well by the mid-1990s, technology changed and that technology miniaturized, and now Direct-To-Home (DTH) broadcasting, including the rise of digital cable, created the ‘infinite dial’ of television. 

Simultaneously, around the same time in 1995, RSS was created (Real Simple Syndication), which then knows the exact internet address for each podcast show, which you can now subscribe to and have it auto-magically delivered to each computer that asks for it.

The invention of RSS had two significant outcomes:

First, it paved the way for the Internet to become, in effect, a broadcaster, for different podcast shows. And if you know anything about how highly regulated and controlled OTA Broadcasting(Over The Air) is, then you know this is significant. In my career chapter as Executive Director of the the Documentary Organization of Canada (DOC), I wrote and delivered policy briefs to the Federal regulating body (the CRTC), to advocate for why Canadian documentary filmmakers need to have literal space of radio spectrum reserved for them in the airwaves to make sure we don’t lose important stories.

And second, perhaps even more importantly, there was now an infinite dial for podcasts as well (a concept that television pioneered). There are only 24 hours in each day to program radio slots. With on-demand internet distribution, the limit expanded infinitely.

Why am I telling you all of this?

Because one thing that really occurred to me as I went back to reflect on all of this: when RSS grew in popularity (and was supported first by public radio outlets, and then by the happenstance of Steve Jobs falling in love with the idea of podcasts and baking that into his first ever iOs in the iPhone launch of 2007)...it was all done for the love of storytelling. Its roots are from benevolent public radio storytelling ethos, and a Silicon Valley Maverick.

It wasn’t until long after the release of Serial (now we’ve jumped to 2015), that the marketing factions of the world sat up straight and said to themselves: Hold on, we’ve just found a new market….300 million people who now can be fed ads, with a startling intimacy, which we can bank on.

Do you want to hear the whole history of podcasting in under 11 minutes?

You can find that, and also my Teachable Course called A+ Podcast Projects, where I offer a 10-lesson course in how to create a short narrative podcast.

To find out more, including getting your own copy of The Whole History Of Podcasting In Under 11 Minutes GO HERE. ← [that’s my own link to the course that I sell…it’s made for students, but sold to educators]  

It’s a college-level curriculum, where I teach the podcasting piece, and the educator teaches the academic material.

It begins with an 11- minute history lesson in podcasting…and then gives students the tools to create a short narrative podcast, with listening experiences and interactive hands-on worksheets.

If you know a teacher somewhere who’s fed up with students passing in work that was written by an AI bot, rather than themselves, please share this email link with them.

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I’ll be back soon with more great listens, reviews and interviews.

Have you found these two shows yet? Hint…I’ll be speaking to them both soon!