Higher Ed Podcasting Is Having a Moment
Last weekend I had the opportunity to attend HigherEd PodCon, the first conference devoted to podcasting across higher ed. Thanks to UPCEA, which sponsors my Intentional Teaching podcast, for sending me to Chicago for this very engaging conference! I thought I would share a few highlights from the conference here on the blog.
At a big picture level, I was surprised to see so many different higher ed podcasts! I’m familiar with ones that focus on teaching and learning (Teaching in Higher Ed, Tea for Teaching, and so on), but that’s just a small piece of the higher ed podcast landscape. I learned about faculty producing podcasts as public scholarship, campus podcast networks that support student-produced podcasts, alumni-focused podcasts, staff-focused podcasts, podcasts for professional associations, and more. I wear a lot of different podcasting hats, so most of these types of podcasts were interesting to me. One way you can get a sense of this landscape is by listening to the Continuing Studies podcast hosted by Jennifer-Lee and Neil McPhedran. They interview higher ed podcasters of all kinds.
The conference keynote was a live recording of Continuing Studies in which the hosts Jennifer and Neil interviewed Matt Abrahams, host and producers of the interview-based Think Fast Talk Smart podcast. Matt teaches strategic communication at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and his podcast, which started as a Stanford project but is now an independent production, has had over 68 million downloads. That’s an incredible scale and not one I’m aiming for with my podcast, but it was still fascinating to hear about Matt’s process for interviewing guests: always keep the audience in mind, ask a few standard questions of all guests, listen for the quote you’ll tease in the cold opening. And I took notes on a few moves he and his team are making to expand their podcast, including creating playlists of episodes on particular themes and building an AI chatbot that can provide advice based on past episodes–and link to the episodes it uses in its answers!
Think Fast Talk Smart has leaned heavily into video in the last year as a way to grow its audience. “The platforms really want to push video,” Matt Abrahams said in his keynote, “so if you have video, the platform will help with discovery.” The EDUCAUSE Shop Talk podcast has taken a similar approach. Host Sophie White and producer Kelli Horan gave a presentation about their video-first approach to podcasting. EDUCAUSE is the professional association for higher ed IT folks, and EDUCAUSE Shop Talk is meant to provide actionable insight to such professionals, whether or not they’re involved with EDUCAUSE. The podcast also serves as marketing for various reports and products from EDUCAUSE, so the producers are wanting to cast a wide net for audience members. They’ll record an interview with guests, then produce that as a full video episode on YouTube, a full audio episode for the podcast feed, and a number of short videos for sharing on the socials. Although they make portrait-oriented shorts for YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, it sounded like the landscape-oriented shorts they make for LinkedIn get the most engagement, mainly because their target audience is on LinkedIn.
I’ve been told to add video to my podcast, but I’ve been hesitant to do so. I’m not convinced that the faculty and faculty developers and instructional designers in my podcast audience are looking for teaching and learning content on YouTube and TikTok. But they are on LinkedIn, so that approach to using video intrigues me. Video is a ton of work, however. I speak from past experience with video projects, but also from what Sophie and Kelli shared in their presentation. Kelli has a stellar video background (she’s shown filmed at SXSW!) and spends a good chunk of her work hours making EDUCAUSE Shop Talk happen. It’s hard seeing me spending the time or having the skills to do video for Intentional Teaching, but maybe I can come up with something beyond the podcast itself that’s LinkedIn-friendly.
One takeaway from the conference was that the strategies you use for podcasting should be informed by the goals you have for your podcast. Think Fast Talk Smart and EDUCAUSE Shop Talk are trying to reach wide audiences, but other podcasts have different goals. I saw a presentation by Alex Greenwood who produces the Central Speaks podcast out of the University of Central Missouri. That podcast features interviews with university staff about their work and their lives. Alex said that he doesn’t care about download numbers, but he does care about how many Central Missouri staff listen to the show. Similarly, Chris Lewis produces SA Voices from the Field for NASPA, the professional association for student affairs administrators. It’s a podcast featuring student affairs professionals aimed at student affairs professionals, so connecting with that particular audience is more important than overall podcast growth.
A couple of the HigherEd PodCon sessions I attended focused on storytelling through guest interviews. Gordon Katic produces Cited, a podcast that helps convey deep scholarly work to more general audiences. Gordon described the “ladder of abstraction” as he calls it, moving from actual events on the ground to those events abstracted in some systemized way (what we often think of as scholarly research) to bigger philosophical questions or enduring understandings. I gather most academics like talking in that middle level, so a good interviewer needs to prompt them to dip into the more concrete and more abstract levels. Gordon also talked about having a narrative arc to a podcast episode. This can be as simple as starting with the world as it was, then describing some catalyzing event and the actions that followed, and ending with the world as it is now. I can definitely see building an interview about change in one’s teaching around that structure!
I had the chance to meet Sarah Holtan in person at the conference. Sarah hosts and produces Get Down to College Business, a podcast exploring the use of business tactics by colleges and universities. Sarah had me on her show last month to talk about the ways that centers for teaching and learning provide value to an institution and its teaching mission. It was great to meet Sarah in person and to hear from her about interview strategies. Her first piece of advice was to focus on the end goal–what do you want your listeners to take away from this interview?–but not to force the journey. She prepares questions for her guests in advance, but doesn’t follow them like a Q&A. She uses those questions to guide something more conversational. That’s exactly the approach I take on Intentional Teaching! She also shared some tips for active listening during an interview (summarize, affirm, highlight a key takeaway, offer a personal example, and such), and talked through the choices she sometimes make to push through a difficult moment with a guest.
During Sarah’s session with Chris Lewis, I thought of three tips I would share if I were presenting to other higher ed podcasters interested in conducting better interviews:
- Send your interview questions to the guest in advance. Not every guest needs this (or even wants this), but many appreciate knowing where the interview might go and some will do some intentional prep based on your questions. And your neurodivergent guests who process differently will really appreciate the extra time to prepare.
- Tell your guests how long you’ll record and how long the edited interview will be. I usually block an hour for an Intentional Teaching interview, record for about 45 minutes, and edit the interview down to 35 minutes for the episode. Giving guests that info, along with the number of questions I’m planning, helps them pace their answers.
- Feel free to talk to your guests in ways that make them feel comfortable and keep the conversation authentic, knowing that you can cut your own comments out later in editing. I’ll often tell a story to connect with a guest, then edit out my story later to keep the final episode concise and focused on the guest.
My trip to Chicago for HigherEd PodCon was a short one, but I did manage to fit in a little birdwatching Saturday morning before the conference. I visited Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary on the shore of Lake Michigan. It’s one of the best birding spots in the country, and during the summer it’s home to a nesting family of adorable piping plovers. These birds are incredibly rare on the Great Lakes, with just 80 known pairs. Back in 2019, the first pair nested at the Montrose public beach in 71 years, and they were dubbed Monty and Rose by Chicago bird lovers. Volunteers sprang into action to make sure that the pair were safe from predators and from humans, and Monty and Rose came back for several years to the area to nest. Sadly, they died in 2022, but their son Imani now makes Montrose beach his summer home, and I was thrilled to see Imani and two of his offspring while I was there this weekend. I couldn’t get close enough for a great photo, but I’ll leave you with my long shot of one of the chicks, as well as a close-up of a spotted sandpiper who posed for me on the pier.
