Abstract:

In the year 2022, about 424 million people listened to podcasts globally. Statistics from the US and Germany show that up to 50% of podcast listeners are in the age group of students in higher education. Although there is yet little research on the use and effectiveness of teaching with podcasts in higher education, studies suggest that students find them useful and motivating and that learning with podcasts can improve student performance (Araújo and Rodrigues, 2019) such as students’ reflective skills (Andersen and Dau, 2021) and promote active learning (Hall and Jones, 2021). Students today are confronted with a high level of complexity in their everyday lives, often trying to manage the demands of working and studying at the same time. This requires flexibility from students as well as universities, which should offer innovative and agile forms of teaching and learning, such as blended learning, the combination of different teaching methods and digital media. Podcasts can flexibly be integrated into the agile learning and working routine of students because they can be consumed on smartphones or other devices at convenient times and at the students' own pace. Podcasts also have a high potential for case-based teaching through presenting case studies about companies in a more authentic, personal, and engaging way than is possible in written form, making it easier for students to understand the background and challenges of the companies and making the subject matter more relevant and interesting. Through first-hand access to industry experts in the form of podcast interviews, students gain a unique perspective and authentic insights into companies and industries and their respective challenges and can thus broaden their understanding of business practice, which will prepare them for their future work life. Learning with case study podcasts is a multistage process, starting with an initial reflection on the content while hearing the podcast and a more in-depth understanding and processing while applying theoretical models and methods in group work and teacher-moderated class discussions.

The paper presents a project of the School of Business of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland in which the project team is developing case study podcasts together with Swiss-based technology startups to apply them in case-based teaching in Business and Information Systems study programs. The goal of the project is to facilitate students' access to case study contexts by allowing them to listen to podcasts for self-study and develop solutions for practice-oriented business and technology challenges in the classroom and guided group work. This provides an engaging blended learning approach for the students through increased motivation to consume the learning material as well as a deeper connection to the study material, compared to the more commonly applied text-based case studies. This can enable much more productive classroom discussions and group work and could therefore provide improved learning outcomes, such as increased reflection, critical thinking, as well as analytical and problem-solving skills. The paper enriches the blended learning debate with details about the case study podcast production from a content-related, technological and didactical perspective as well as provides insights into the planned evaluation of the application of case study podcasts with regard to learning outcomes.

Keywords:

Case-based teaching, blended learning, audio podcast, case study podcast, business studies, information systems studies, educational multimedia.