Virginia – you’ve got a point about my narrative being “stilted” – however, in my defense, I would say that the subject matter (learning standards and specifications) is very technical, and quite hard to deliver in a conversational manner; in my view, it’s one of those subjects that is best approached using a multimedia methodology. Give the sophistication of the content, I found that just had to script my answers; I don’t know how coherence my responses would have been is I started talking about the material in an ad hoc manner – it certainly would not have been very fluid. As such, I made a concerted effort to break the phrasing and sentences into meaningful and comprehensible “audio objects” which led to the stiff – but hopefully highly understandable – delivery.

It’s a compromise, and compromises don’t always make the most electrifying content, but I felt that the key here was to be understood by the audience, and to elicit the answers as clearly as possible, especially as the role of standards is not inherently “sexy,” yet is vital to effective e-learning delivery and management.

I’ll be discussing non- and informal learning in a podcast in the near future, which is a much livelier subject from a sonic perspective, and one that is easier to discuss in a colloquial manner. The difference in the qualia between the two should highlight what I mean.

Dawn – thanks for sharing your insights and experiences into the many factors that can influence a podcast. Personally, I think that your team do a great job compiling consistently high-quality presenters and material.

Michael
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Thanks for the background on our podcasting approach. Very clear and valuable. I like your description and the diagram.

Virginia,

Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback. As Michael wrote, our podcasts can be produced either synchronously where an interview conversation is recorded with all the participants present (either in person, via phone, or via a web conferencing call), which in general produces a more conversational session indeed, or asynchronously where each participant records his or her own part and the whole session is assembled afterward. There are obvious pros and cons in each approach. Some of our participants are choosing the second approach due to scheduling conflicts, different time zones, and different geographies. Overall, we have to be very flexible with what our participants prefer as we aim to make the podcasting production as convenient for them as possible (so, in general we don’t ask our participants to re-record and we don’t follow up with more questions, unless there is a very important reason; if we believe the topic needs further attention, we usually plan to record another new podcast). The reason being that almost all our participants are very well sought-after industry leaders that run very tight schedules and we respect that.

There are also some factors important for the quality of the final podcast that are common to both approaches. Those factors involve planning aspects (e.g. finding the right participants for our audience and our program goals, coming up with topics of interest, promoting and encouraging sharing of the podcasts, facilitating interactions between presenters and the audience, etc.), personal aspects (e.g. whether the participants are good presenters or not, whether they have been adequately prepared for the session or not, whether the questions are helpful to offer insights and value to the audience, etc.) and technical items (e.g. quality of recording device, quality of phone line or VoIp session, ability to filter out noise during editing etc.)

Hope that provides a bit more information on the internals of Xyleme Voices.

However, I like the spontaneity of an interview. I wondered also if there were follow up questions edited in after your initial answers were submitted? Were you asked to expand on topics?