After much debate concerning the best way to make podcasts available to our students on Blackboard, it has been decided that adding a new 'podcast episode' directly to the learning environment for each active cohort is likely to be the best way forward.

Our course team had identified some problems when adding podcasts to the 'course content' section of Blackboard, and linking these to the individual courses. These problems were related to difficulties making the podcasts available, inconcsistent presentation of podcasts once they were in Blackboard, and the amount of time it was taking students to get the podcasts to play in order to listen to them from remote locations.

Discussions with members of ITS and the BDRA have led us to the conclusion that these problems might be overcome by adding the podcasts individually to each of the courses. Although this may prove to be slightly more time consuming, we hope it will reduce the technical difficulties we had been experiencing. In addition to this, it should help us to solve some of the potential difficulties associated with storage space available within the course content area of Blackboard.

Yestrerday, I used this method to uploaded 12 podcasts that I have developed for the module 'Research Methods in Occupational Psychology.' I found this to be relatively quick and very simple to do. I believe it looks neat and should be fairly intuitive in allowing students to navigate their way around the podcasts.

We will await feedback from the students to see if they agree...