Listen Up!: Using Audio Files in the Curriculum

Listen Up!: Using Audio Files in the Curriculum

by Tuiren Bratina, Tom Bratina and Anthony Bratina

Faculty in the University of North Florida's Counseling Education and Middle/Secondary School Teacher Education Programs started delivering courses via the Internet in the Fall 1997. Among those courses are two that are strictly focused on learning experiences about counseling or middle school. Although students in Career and Lifestyle Development and Counseling and Middle School Philosophy/Curriculum use the Internet, these two courses are not designed to teach students about technology. Initially, the Internet course content was solely text-based with graphics. We have since added audio files to the lessons. This article describes the situations for which we use audio to improve the delivery of our courses.
Three Applications for Audio We have identified three ways in which we most frequently employ audio files. The lines of distinction for ways to use audio clips are not always clear. Nor do we believe they must be categorized in the ways that we have presented them in this article. We hope these examples of how audio works best for us will be helpful to you.
Friendly greetings! "Hi, I'm excited about teaching this course. You'll have plenty of opportunities to visit schools, as well as to interact with your classmates…" Dr. Gerald Torkelson, in his article about the history of AECT (Special 75th Anniversary Issue, January/February 1998), noted that "additional problems with distance instruction relate to the remoteness of the learner from the source of instruction" (p. 50). Many people like to associate a voice to the words that are used for the online lessons. For the first few lessons, we have informal greetings by the instructors. They introduce themselves and welcome the students. Truth be told we actually put a face to the introduction, too. When watching news shows like CNN, notice how frequently there is a picture of a reporter and an audio is played. That is what we do. It was a bit humorous that a few students mentioned the "video" when, in fact, it was an audio accompanied by a still picture.
While the students are not held accountable for the content of the first audios, it does provide a motivational and relaxing message. Starting with audios that use this informal approach also gives the students time to obtain (or locate a computer that has) the free software to play the audio files. The operative word is "free," because we want to maximize the accessibility of the technology that is required for these courses.
Administrative Tips Just as we often spend a few minutes of "traditional" classes reminding students about administrative tasks, so too do we have audio clips devoted to these types of tasks. We have reminded students that they will need to start preparing early for a group assignment because it is not always easy to arrange meeting times when several people are involved. We have stressed that students are to contact school officials and follow appropriate procedures for assignments that require admission into K-12 classrooms.
Our surveys of student perceptions often reveal that students want more information about course assignments. Using the audio to clarify or emphasize certain aspects of student assignments contributes toward mollifying that valid concern, too.
Explanations of Content Many students are auditory learners. Giving students an opportunity to listen to discourse about specific concepts, principles, or topics can provide an excellent starting point for focusing on the content area. The dialogue can be used to explain difficult-to-understand material, to emphasize the more important topics, or to formulate stimulating questions for the students. In our opinion, using audio for the purpose of explaining academic content is the best application of this technology for distance learning courses.
So that the use of the audio does not merely become a "nice to have" feature, we need to become adept at incorporating important information and issues in the audios we use to present course content. We also must include ways of evaluating whether students grasped the content presented in the audio tape. This is not unlike the situations in our "traditional" classes where we elaborate on the readings in a required course textbook or provide an opportunity and setting for students to apply theories or positions stated in a required course textbook. For example, in a Job Seeking Skills lesson of the Career and Lifestyle Development and Counseling course, an audio clip of a "mock" interview was presented. Based on the assigned readings and presentation of the instructor notes for that lesson, the students discuss (in a chat room setting) the inappropriate questions in the "mock" interview. Why were the questions inappropriate and did the interviewee respond to those questions smartly? The students were to describe how they would react if an interviewer posed those types of inappropriate questions?
In the "Middle School Students: Implications for Curriculum" lesson of the Middle School Philosophy/Curriculum course, students were to listen to the audio portion of the lesson for examples of curriculum strategies based on young adolescents' developmental needs. The examples presented on the audio were supplementary to the textbook reading. Students in this course were expected to include some of the strategies mentioned in the audio in their individually submitted assignments for that lesson.
A Brief Word About Creating the Audio Files for Internet Use When we first added audio to our lessons, there was a "technical" person who created the audio files and web pages so that people accessing these pages could listen to the tapes if the computer they were using had the free software installed. Much to our joy (and because the "technical" person strongly motivated us to learn how to accomplish the necessary steps to creating audio files for Internet use!), we discovered these audio clips can be developed quickly and with nominal required skills. While it is beyond the scope of this article to describe how to produce audio clips, we do encourage teachers to pursue avenues for obtaining inexpensive equipment and the minimal amount of training that it takes to do this. It may be that a person dedicated to using educational technology would be asked to do this, or some teachers may want to develop the ability to do this themselves. There are advantages of having a dedicated computer specialist assume the responsibility versus the advantages of having individual teachers assume the responsibility should be weighed in this decision-making process.
Ancillary Considerations We mentioned that students should be held accountable for important information that has been disseminated via audio. Let us also advise you that the first time we added audio to our lessons, we were deliberately slow to include questions that required students to have listened to the audio. We were uncertain how easily all of the students would be able to obtain the software or access to computers that were capable of playing the audio files. Once we found that students were all able to accomplish this with relative ease, then we proceeded to include assignment items about the voice-delivered academic content.
We also checked the capabilities of computers at facilities in the local area. Persons responsible for the software loaded on their machines were very helpful in adding that capability if it was not already there. It is worth noting that some facilities require users to provide their own headsets to listen to audio files. The reason for this is because it can be disturbing to others. That is a consideration for those who are setting up laboratories.
Next Steps Although we would prefer to use videos throughout the course, we have found that the obstacles are still too difficult to overcome. We do use two videos for the orientation. Since the orientation sessions are required, we know that the video clips work well on the technology we use at the orientation.
The speeds of the connections the students may use for the remaining lessons may not be fast enough to view a good video. Some suggest that we are still several years away from high-speed access for the masses ("Video on the Web Bogs Down in Standards War," http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_2549.html). At present we believe using video clips would actually detract from the purposes of the courses because getting high quality videos would be more of a hassle than a help.
We have every intention of increasing the number of videos as the technology improves. However, we will take it one step at a time. Remember these are not technology courses, and we want the requirements to be such that students can easily obtain access to computers that have the course software requirements.