Using Podcasting For Learning — In A Big Way: ChinesePod.com

You’ve probably never heard of it, but the fifth most popular podcast in the world  is educational. ChinesePod.com — now with over 500 individual podcasts — provides both free and subscription audio content to help anyone with a web connection learn Mandarin. Started by Ken Carroll (an Irishman — go figure) the premise was simple. Create simple conversational shows, with engaging professional hosts, and use that platform to help people learn.

The Wikipedia says:

ChinesePod provides free daily podcasts, with an accompanying text expansion exercises and other extensive tutoring aids available to paid subscribers or “premium subscribers”.

The free daily podcasts range in difficulty from “Newbie” or “菜鸟” to the “Media” or “媒体” level and has an average of ten to twenty minutes lesson time. Users are also encouraged to interact with the ChinesePod hosts and other fellow CPodders around the world on their website and in the forums. Topics can vary from asking specific lesson questions to requesting content for future podcasts.

Using the i-Pod model, users download the sessions and listen to them on MP-3 players, allowing the lessons to be consumed during travel, time off, or any spare moments. This is an amazing application of some basic adult learning models:

1. Immediate gratification I am able to actually say specific conversational phrases at the end of the podcast.
2. Free/inexpensive The podcasts are free — teasers, actually — that promote the subscription offers of further language learning components
3. Quick Listening while traveling or otherwise occupied makes it easy
4. User controlled The user can choose which podcasts to listen to, in any order they like

So if you wanted to use this model in your marketing / training efforts, what would it look like? Could you create a short information 10-minute talk each day, and then build with the community you create?

Florist
Daily short discussion with master gardners about different plants for the area

Auto Repair
Daily short answer show to typical questions about auto repairs

Psychiatrist
Daily short discussions of different issues that many people face

Related posts:

1. “Instruction Does Not Cause Learning…”
2. Serving Up Some Sacred Cows Of Learning
3. Is Learning Going Down The Toilet?
4. Beyond The Lecture — Fighting The Learning Wars
5. ADDIE 2.0 — Designing Learning Without A Net