Although the podcasting module of ALKU’s digiloikka project will only be rolled out as a course in the spring, the actual podcast series accompanying the course has now been completed.

The series consists of 6 episodes, guiding students through the process of building their own podcast, from coming up with a central concept, over shaping their academic ideas into a more audience-friendly narrative, to including other experts in their work. Throughout the series, students can hear a number of seasoned journalists and podcasters of work, giving them access to a broad range of voices in the field – and thus a diverse toolbox, full of different perspectives.

We had to rethink some of the conceptual tenets of this module in order to make room for all these different aspects of our speakers’ expertise (we eventually opted for a multilingual solution, having speakers in both Finnish and English for the series to accommodate different aspects of ’popularization’), but the project was essentially completed as planned, without any unpleasant surprises. To the contrary, we ended up with a more inspiring, and above all more ’open access’ result than we had originally planned: since all expert participants in the series were in fact quite keen to make their episode public, the podcasting course will be available beyond Moodle as well. The technical guides and assignments accompanying the series will only be made available for University of Helsinki -teachers for now, but expansion of this course into a real MOOC could be envisioned in the future, after piloting the course.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMS9nKqvhx8)

Josephine Hoegaerts, Associate Professor, European Area and Cultural Studies

Lotta Vuorio, Digiloikka Technical Assistant