Beginning this fall, Purdue University will be offering a podcasting service called “BoilerCast” to faculty who would like their classes recorded and made available to students as RSS-enabled audio feeds for downloading, streaming, or podcasting. The service, furnished by Purdue’s Information Technology department, promises “no lead time” scheduling for professors teaching in classrooms that are already set up to record audio. Other classrooms can be accommodated “with sufficient notice.”

The BoilerCast subscription list is pretty spiffy-looking and already includes over 40 courses, plus a self-guided audio tour of the library. (I wonder: will that tour change over the course of a semester? is an RSS feed needed here?) The BoilerCast press release is most enthusiastic, right down to its Peter Piper alliteration and its very reasonable answer to the predictable question of “won’t this encourage students to skip class?” Other predictable questions were not addressed in the press release, however. Do students need to sign releases if there’s a Q&A session as part of the class? What about classes that are not primarily lecture-based? Is anyone worried that an entire set of class lectures would amount to a free course for auditors (in the truest sense of the word)? I know how I’d answer those questions; I’m curious about how Purdue would, or has.

All of that said, I think BoilerCast is a great idea. Our own “Profcast” project here is less comprehensive and aimed more at the general podcast audience, but both ideas strike me as valid ways to present education as a public good.

Thanks to Podcasting News for the initial story.