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Upgrade to Blackboard 7 - Podcasting

Podcasting is a new feature in Blackboard 7. Posting podcasts to Blackboard offers the following advantages over "regular" audio or video files:

• If enabled, students will be able to subscribe to your podcast via an RSS feed in a tool such as iTunes. This means that new episodes will automatically be delivered to them, even if they are not logged into Blackboard.
• Students can place a "Recent Podcasts" module on their Blackboard homepage, which will automatically list and provide access to the most recent podcasts posted.
• The media files are not stored in your course web site itself, but on a specialized media server. Your course size will not increase, and your media files will be delivered more quickly to students. This does not affect the ability to copy this type of content.
• If you are using Blackboard to deliver regular lecture recordings to your students, we strongly encourage doing so via the podcast tool.

Uploading a podcast

1. The first step is to prepare your podcast files. Be aware that uncompressed audio or video files can be very large, download slowly, and fill up your students' iPods or similar devices quickly. It is important to work with compressed files. Contact Curricular.Computing@Dartmouth.edu if you have questions about compressing your podcasts, or getting them into a supported file format!
2. Name your audio files correctly: do not include unusual characters such as backslashes (/) in the filename. Make sure the file name terminates in the proper file extension, depending on the file type. Podcasting supports the following file types:
   • .m4a
   • .mp3
   • .mov
   • .mp4
   • .m4v
   • .pdf
3. Decide where you want to post the files. The content area "Documents" is a good location - we'll use that for this tutorial. If you have many audio clips, it is a good idea to create a subfolder for them. See the separate tutorial on items and folders to learn how to do this.
4. In the left-hand navigation bar, click on Control Panel.
5. On the Control Panel page, in the Content Areas section, click on Documents.
   
6. On the Documents page, locate the drop-down menu on the right of the gray editing bar. From this menu, select Podcast Episode and click Go.
7. On the Add Podcast Episode page, assign a name to the podcast episode.
8. If you wish, type explanatory text about the episode into the text box.
9. On the Add Podcast Episode page, in section 2, "Podcast Media", click on Choose File or Browse and navigate to the file you wish to podcast.
10. Click Submit.
11. This will post the episode. It will appear with a listen link, which allows students to access the file in the Blackboard browser window.

Enabling an RSS feed for your podcast

A podcast RSS feed allows you to publish your podcast beyond Blackboard. It allows your students to "subscribe" to your podcast with a tool such as iTunes, i.e. to automatically receive new postings without checking Blackboard.

1. To create an RSS feed for your podcast. In the left-hand navigation bar, click on Control Panel
2. On the Control Panel page, in the Content Areas section, click on Manage Podcast.
   
3. On the Manage Podcast page, in section 3, "Options", set the visibility to "Everyone". The URL of your RSS feed appears in parentheses right here.
4. Click Submit.

Student access to Blackboard podcasts

1. If you have not enabled an RSS feed, student need to access individual podcast "episodes" by clicking on them, and playing them in their web browser.
2. If you have enabled an RSS feed, students can subscribe to it. To do so, a student can click on Course Tools and then choose the Podcast tool.
   
   The RSS and iTunes buttons allow students to subscribe to the podcast with iTunes, or with another RSS reader.