Major Things

Dimensions of Law

You know, that thing that guides socienty and controls our lives.

About the Assignment

The professional podcast assignment had students work in groups to create an instructional, informative, and/or descriptive podcast mini-series about their professional field. This assignment scaffolded from previous assignments, and it prepared students for their final project, a professional ePortfolio website. Students applied professional writing techniques to create proposals for individual podcast episodes. These proposed episodes focus on an aspect of their academic or professional interests. Working from these proposals, students then presented an elevator pitch, aimed at a popular podcast series.

During their presentations, students noted similarities between their proposed topics and those of their classmates. From there, students formed small groups and developed a series of podcasts based on their proposals. Each student was responsible for one episode of the series, but many elected to collaborate on all the episodes. Producing podcasts has students using multimodal writing for professional and public audiences. Students were given a maximum time limit of 7-10 minutes per episode, which had them thinking carefully about craft and brevity in digital communication. Each group produced a series website for their podcasts, explaining the purpose and ethos of the series and how it relates to each episode. They practiced usability testing and feedback-driven revision.