The authors presented a paper at ECER 08 (Souter & Muir, 2008) where they described a pilot project that investigated using student produced podcasts as a means of assessment. The results of this pilot were encouraging and the aspect of students’ discussion and questioning related to the assessed podcasts appeared to be a particularly interesting part of the project and worthy of further study. The pre-service science teachers who are the focus of this study had already successfully completed school placements and were considered skilled in planning and delivering presentations, so, as in the previous study, one of their assessment exercises was replaced with a student produced podcast which was posted to an electronic conference. The students were given a few days to listen to each other’s podcasts, to ask and answer questions and to make comments online. This exercise responds to some of the issues raised by Boud (2000) who was critical of assessment practices in higher education institutions and suggested “The purposes of assessment should be extended to include the preparation of students for sustainable assessment”. For this study a direct comparison could be made to a similar group of pre-service science students following a PGDE(S) course. Research questions addressed are: 1) Do the students feel listening to the podcast was educationally beneficial? 2) How do the podcast group’s attitudes differ from the group doing the traditional presentation? 3) Do the students feel the online discussion and comment was valuable? 4) How do the podcast and the presentation groups’ attitudes differ in relation to the discussion? 5) Is there a qualitative or quantitative difference in the students’ feedback? Draper and Maguire (2007) explored the use of podcasts in campus based teaching and suggest underlying principles that they hoped would lead to successful integration of podcasts in learning and teaching. The project described in this paper builds on some of the issues they identified including: learner led uses of technology, matched to existing practice and the timeliness and synchronous nature of courses. Although there is still little published about podcasting in education, and particularly the use of student produced podcasts, there is more published on the electronic conferencing and how to support online student discussion and activity and the authors drew on the work of Salmon (2002) and the IMPALA Project (2006) to provide a framework for analysing the activity and the learning that took place.

The authors supported the pre-service science teachers in the process of creating podcasts. This included an initial briefing and support from ICT staff in technical aspects. Data on students prior experience and their attitudes was collected by questionnaires issued to the both the podcast and the presentation groups. These questionnaires drew on the work of Souter and Muir (2008), which drew on work by Chan, Lee and McLoughlin (2006), as well as questionnaires issued by the IMPALA Project (IMPALA, 2006). In addition, both the online discussion and the discussions in the presentations were analysed and common themes and issues identified. An analysis of these questionnaires and the student contributions was used to define issues that were discussed in small group and individual interviews.

The project hopes to provide further evidence of the value of assessing students by podcast and in particular to identify some advantages in encouraging online peer discussion of the student produced podcasts. An analysis of the time taken by both staff and students is also undertaken so that the cost and benefit of podcast assessment and online discussion can be considered against the presentation form of assessment undertaken by other students.