Lesson 7 - Choosing Media

4.4. Strengths and Weaknesses of Audio as a Teaching Medium

First, some advantages:

• It is much easier to make an audio clip or podcast than a video clip or a simulation.
• Audio requires far less bandwidth than video or simulations hence downloads quicker and can be used over relatively low bandwidths.
• It is easily combined with other media such as text, mathematical symbols, and graphics, allowing more than one sense to be used and allowing for ‘integration’.
• Some students prefer to learn by listening compared with reading.
• audio combined with text can help develop literacy skills or support students with low levels of literacy.
• Audio provides the variety and another perspective from the text, a ‘break’ in learning that refreshes the learner and maintains interest.
• Nicola Durbridge, in her research at the Open University, found that audio increased distance students’ feelings of personal ‘closeness’ with the instructor compared with video or text, i.e. it is a more intimate medium.

In particular, added flexibility and learner control means that students will often learn better from pre-prepared audio recordings combined with accompanying textual material (such as a web site with slides) then they will from a live classroom lecture.

There are also of course disadvantages of audio:

• Audio-based learning is difficult for people with a hearing disability.
• Creating audio is extra work for an instructor.
• audio is often best used in conjunction with other media such as text or graphics thus adding complexity to the design of teaching.
• Recording audio requires at least a minimal level of technical proficiency.
• Spoken language tends to be less precise than text.

Increasingly video is now being used to combine audio over images, such as in the Khan Academy, but there are many instances, such as where students are studying from prescribed texts, where recorded audio works better than a video recording.

So let’s hear it for audio!