Podcast vs. Lecture

A new report argues that students who have access to podcasted lectures perform better than those who just attend lectures.

Students have been handed another excuse to skip class from an unusual quarter. New psychological research suggests that university students who download a podcast lecture achieve substantially higher exam results than those who attend the lecture in person.

Podcasted lectures offer students the chance to replay difficult parts of a lecture and therefore take better notes, says Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who led the study.

"It isn't so much that you have a podcast, it's what you do with it," she says.

What interests me here is that this report doesn't reject the lecture per se, but instead sees podcasts as an important way for students to review their work.