Students’ perspectives on a podcast-based assignment exercise, while learning to communicate about infections and vaccines

Assignment topic, assessment tools and assessment criteria

In week 1 (of a 12-week semester), students selected their assignment topic and formed groups of six using the self-assign option in the learning management system, Canvas. The assignment required students to review information about the scenarios they had chosen for study (Table 1). Students were required to synthesise literature from a variety of sources into a script for a simulated 10-min health podcast. Three students would play the role of laypersons with vaccine concerns (from controversies, vaccine failure, misinformation, antivaccination articles) and the other three students would play an expert panel offering professional advice. The latter would need to pitch their responses in an audience-appropriate manner. They were to consider that the laypersons in their scenario (Table 1) were all well-read. Vaccines selected for this assessment were from the Australian Immunisation schedule.⁹ A lecture on these vaccines preceded the exercise. Between weeks 5 and 7, students prepared and submitted a script of their panel discussions with citations, through Turnitin on the Canvas learning management system for feedback from tutors.

A training session was provided by an in-house Adobe Audition specialist on how to create and edit audio files for podcasts. Students were free to use other software. A sample lesson plan may be found in our paper on lesson plans for podcasting in class.¹⁰ Suitable examples of podcasts were shared with students, e.g. American Society of Microbiology podcasts (see https://asm.org/Podcasts). Students were free to be creative with sound, voices and flow of content.

Students were provided a simple rubric of four criteria as a marking guideline:

Students answered the PPES survey in week 1 and the PoPES survey in week 11. Questions are listed in Table 2 along with the analysis.

Data analysis

Responses provided without a UPIC were analysed under the independent sample columns and those with UPICs were analysed as paired samples. Non-parametric independent sample (Mann–Whitney U test) and paired sample tests (Wilcoxon signed-rank test) were employed to check whether the mean score differences for each question before and after the assignment exercise, were statistically significant using SPSS (ver. 27, IBM). The level of significance used was alpha = 0.05. R sentiment analysis was performed on answers to open-ended questions.

Inferences and implications for using student-driven podcast assignments

The general observation from this study on how students perceived preparing a group podcast assignment seems optimistic. Similar to the experience of other educators,^7,12 running of the exercise was dependent on several aspects – the podcast objectives, students’ motivation, group preparation, quality participation, the experience of learning, tutor’s encouragement, guidance and feedback. This assignment provided social constructivist opportunities for students to network in person with their peers and to improve interpersonal skills, which wasn’t possible during the COVID pandemic. As in other similar studies,^7,8,12 students found the approach ‘fun’ and a good experience.

Fig. 2. 

The main (a) positive and (b) negative sentiments extracted from the open-ended responses using R sentiment analysis.

In prior assignments, e.g. group presentations, students would often choose review articles over actual studies for references. They would rarely browse through grey literature and news articles for contemporary issues, which is important for a broadened outlook and engagement¹³ with issues beyond core scientific knowledge. Examples in this context include policies, vaccine failures, antivaxxers. In this exercise, a wide array of information had to be read, to come up with the content. Additionally, with ChatGPT taking over as an assistant for student essays,¹⁴ asking students to formulate scripts for debates might be a solution for more active reading and synthesis of authentic discussions.

For this task, students were required to do the same amount of reading as they would have for a group assignment, review or presentation, except that in a podcast, they would need to learn how to articulate this information to various lay audiences. Communicating health information to patients is a key skill that health practitioners need to develop; hence, this project gave students a space to go beyond creating written assignments, wherein they would find their own voice and reflect on how it would sound while discussing matters with their study participants or patients.¹⁵

Podcasts, like scholarly outputs, have the potential to reach a wide global network for critical discussion; hence, it was important to impart to the students the value of curating their scripts with the tutor before recording. Having done these steps at an undergraduate level, students would remember these skills in communication-based professions.

In this digital age, it is advantageous if students leaving university are fluent with digital software for communicating health topics. In this exercise, we made available Adobe Audition software and training and that program was accepted by the majority as a preferred podcasting tool, even though there were mixed responses on its ease of use. Unlike the formal manner in which typical academic group presentations and reviews are conducted; in podcasts, students could use music, sound effects, dramatic articulations of their voice and empathy while communicating in their mock panel discussions. Hence, this was evidence that students understood the value of not only using their knowledge in an intelligent discussion, but also communicating it in an interesting and non-technical manner for various lay audiences. Students were allowed to change their names in podcasts (while sharing correct identities for grading) and this was appreciated by those who were not confident of their communication skills, as they were able to experiment in a safe space.

The podcast-based learning exercise was not without flaw. The sample size was small. As noted from the students’ negative experiences, similar pressures found in other types of group assignments could be seen (participation of individuals, varying quality of work, free-loading, assignment rescue).¹⁶ Learning how to use podcast software also required extra time, both for the tutor and students.

The blended nature of this assignment offered opportunities for meeting face-to-face in class, out of class and online. Literature review and podcast script preparation offered prospects for various facets of the Bloom’s taxonomy to be addressed in infectious disease health education: knowledge and comprehension on the disease and existing treatments; application of learned knowledge to concepts on the vaccine; analysis and evaluation of various reports on vaccine outcomes; synthesis of collaborative findings on these vaccine issues into a meaningful podcast that could be used to fairly address public concerns about various vaccines.¹⁷