In 2015/2016, only about half the population of the United States (age 12+) was familiar with podcasting.
In order to contribute to the knowledge and understanding of podcasting, I created a short course—a podcast primer.
3 definitions
I decided to explain podcasting with three definitions.
The first definition went straight to the core of what a podcast is. A podcast is a show. People know what a show is, and that’s the best way to think about podcasting.
The second was a technical definition. I had listened to a really good explanation from a fellow podcaster. I reached out to him and asked if I could use that clip in my short course. He agreed.
The great part of his definition was its accuracy. The not-so-great part was the number of technical terms. Again, they were accurate, but it was a lot to comprehend. So after playing the entire clip, I broke it down, explaining each part.
The third explanation was what I called a “vision” definition. It was all about what podcasting can do for lifelong learners.
Presentation
Original version
At the time, I was using the Rainmaker Platform for my site. One of their features was a learning management system. It was an evolving platform, and the LMS was very basic.
I decided to use this podcast primer as a test so I could practice with their LMS. I made the course one module with three lessons. Each definition was on a different page with an intro in the beginning. I also put the recording of the entire episode/lesson at the beginning in case anyone wanted to just listen instead of read the whole thing.
Newest version
Recently, when I decided to revive the podcast primer and put it here using WordPress, I put the entire primer on one page using accordion interactions for the three definitions. The audio file is there at the top of the page.
By the way, podcasting has grown every year since it was invented. And it continues to grow. Now 75% of the population is familiar with podcasting. Nearly a quarter of the population listens to 6+ hours of podcasts every week. There are more than a million podcasts with valid RSS feeds in Apple Podcasts.
