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Adding Podcasts to Blackboard
In the OP team, we are really enjoying using podcasts and are finding them a welcome addition to the course. However, it has taken us some time to find the best way of making these available to students, and the best way of adding the content to different courses in a way that was not too time consuming. Now that we have found a way of doing this, I thought it might be useful for me to share some tips that we, as a team, have found useful.
After much discussion and deliberation over the most effective way of putting our podcasts on Blackboard, we (the Occupational Psychology team) have come across a method that we have found to be effective, simple and not too time consuming.
In an earlier post, I mentioned that although we were happy with new ways of adding podcasts, we were still having to repeat the process four times in order to make these podcasts available across cohorts. This was due to difficulties in working out the best way to manage this process in Blackboard.
We have now found a way of reducing all of these problems and have come up with an effective strategy for managing this process. I summarised this strategy and distributed it across members of the course team. A summarised version of these 'tips' is pasted below:
Tips for Adding Podcasts to Blackboard
Various problems seem to arise when podcasts are added via ‘content collection.’ One alternative was to add the content for each cohort separately, which was an effective but time-consuming process. This is not necessary, because content can be copied from one course to another. These steps summarise this process:
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On one of the courses, create a new content area for the podcast series you are creating (e.g. ‘Research Methods Podcasts’) and add all the content to that (i.e. individual podcast episodes, folders with mini-series of podcast episodes)
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Add each podcast as a ‘new podcast episode’ until that content area is complete
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Go to the ‘control panel’ in the course you have been working on
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Control panel → course options → course copy → copy course materials into an existing course → ok
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Add the ‘Destination course ID’ for the course you want to copy to
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In ‘select course materials’ tick the box for the content you want to move (e.g. ‘Res Methods Podcasts’)
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Tick the box for ‘Adaptive release rules for content’
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Tick ‘course copy’
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You will receive a message saying: “This course copy action has been successfully queued. An email will be sent when the process is complete.”
Dr Kelly Barklamb
