Enhancing Student Learning with Podcasting, a Newly Emergent Social Technology

The complement between pull and push learning modes is believed to be contributable to enriching students’ learning experiences. Podcasting, a push technology, can be used to push teaching materials to the students’ handheld devices, allowing them to study without any geographical and temporal constraints. The students can then revise the materials according to their own preferences. This explicit push technology together with students’ implicit pull motivation can encourage the students to learn in a more efficient way. As the students have the autonomy to choose their preferred media to access learning materials, it is believed to be able to increase students’ satisfaction in the learning process. We implemented this idea in one of the courses taught in a university in Hong Kong. The encouraging findings confirmed with our belief that podcasting can help students to learn better by increasing their learning satisfaction.