Supporting student self-study: The educational design of podcasts in a collaborative learning context

One activity-rich way to utilize collaborative learning, team-based learning (TBL), can present students and teachers with both opportunities and challenges. TBL requires students to prepare for each class, where they are then assessed for their ‘readiness’ to apply the concepts learned during their pre-class preparation. This study addresses two aspects of TBL in an aim to better support and facilitate student learning and engagement: (1) supporting students during their pre-class preparation by providing metadata on the often-difficult required readings, and (2) offering students communication from the teacher, or ‘expert’ – something students often perceive as missing in active learning classes. Short, supportive podcasts are provided to students to give context to their out-of-class preparation and to allow them to hear directly from the teacher. Results suggest that the intervention of supportive podcasts successfully addresses these two issues and may benefit other collaborative classrooms that face similar challenges.