Evaluating podcasts

Evaluating podcasts for educational use is a great activity to undertake, especially with children and young people. After all, most new products are designed following an evaluation of what already exists in the "market".

The challenge for educators is writing the criteria. It seems sensible to separate the quality of content from the production quality. In practice, a podcast might have great content but be badly produced with, say, poor audio quality.

Criteria for evaluating the quality of content might be something like:

• the topic is presented in an interesting and imaginative way and the content is well structured and organised
• the quality of production might be: the presenters are clearly heard above background music and effects with any audio effects used to enhance the content and presentation

We have published a PDF version of the criteria and prompts on a 3-page document called "Evaluating Podcasts for Teaching and Learning". This is designed for use by educators and professional development and includes sections on:

• Criteria for evaluating the quality of a podcast
• Criteria for evaluating the suitability of enhanced podcasts
• Prompts for considering podcasts for personalised learning

This publication is now available for download as a PDF file (58 KB). In the near future, we will be publishing versions designed for use with children and young people.

If you are interesting in finding out more, we have included a selection of audio, enhanced and video podcasts to evaluate using these criteria and prompts in our e-learning course: Podcasting Basics.