Imagine this scenario for a moment: It is one week before your big test and you have no time to sit down and study notes. Add to the fact that your ability to take notes is a bit embarrassing and you have no free time to take part in a study group. What do you do?

There is a growing trend in major universities nationwide with professors releasing their lectures on podcasts for students to download, making this type of problem completely nonexistent in the near future.

So what is a podcast exactly? Simply put, it is an audio feed that can be subscribed to through iTunes. By subscribing to it, you will automatically get a new download every time that feed is updated. So say you have a class on Monday. As soon as that class is over, the professor updates the feed with that class lecture of that day. You come back and check the podcast section of your iTunes library that afternoon, and sitting there waiting is the lecture you heard that morning.

The beauty of this technology is the lectures can be put on any Mp3 player and listened to on the go. So if a student has to take care of his or her family or work, he can listen to each lecture whenever he finds the time.

Already these types of podcasts are located in the iTunes store itself in a section under the podcast directory called “iTunes U”. So why doesn’t Arkansas Tech have this type of thing yet?

I asked for an interview earlier last week from a professor about what he would think about it and he simply said he had nothing to say about it because he didn’t know what a podcast was.

In my opinion, this is something that should be mandatory. How hard could it be to record a lecture and release it online? With the right software, it would take maybe one minute of the professor's time. Can they spare it? They spare enough time updating Blackboard don’t they? The answer is, “of course they can.” Even the majority of the students don’t know about podcasting. However, when it is brought up and explained, students are excited about the possibilities.

When asked about these possibilities, junior Ashley Manning said, “I think it would be extremely beneficial for professors to put their lectures as podcasts. I know there are a lot of times while taking notes during lecture that I feel like I miss out on important info. If the information was accessible online I could review the lecture before tests.”

So I urge Arkansas Tech, for the sake of helping students to learn better, to pick up on this. It would be missing a huge opportunity to ignore this, and I know at least someone in authority on campus has to know what a podcast is. Has it been overlooked? Perhaps, but now the issue has been brought up, and it is high time to start releasing lectures as podcasts.