An Overview of Different Approaches for Lecture Casting

Podcasting is a special approach to distribute multimedia (usually audio files) over the internet. Users can subscribe to a particular podcast which is then delivered automatically for replay on their mobile devices (MP3 players, laptops) or desktop computers. Podcasts are not restricted to pure audio files but also include slide shows with synchronized audio replay and video files for mobile multimedia players (such as the new video iPod from Apple). In this paper, we address one particular usage of podcasts for education, i.e. the production and distribution of recorded lectures via podcasting. We describe different realizations of such lecture podcasts, compare their characteristics with established requirements from the general lecture recording scenario, and discuss different usage scenarios.