You’d like the world to learn about, and listen to, the brilliant speakers who present to your university/college/faculty/department/unit. Read my recipe for a quick ’n easy Speaker Series podcast.

Ingredients

1 Speaker series with a dozen or more speakers per year
1 Web page/blog
1 RSS feed
1 Publishing schedule
Release forms
1 Audio recorder
1 Audio editor

Directions

Having speakers who present talks on a regular basis is the easiest way to start a podcast. Mix this speaker series with audio recordings of the talks and your podcast will be ready to serve in no time.

Cook up a web page or blog that:

• describes the purpose of the podcast
• delivers the RSS feed
• lists each talk with a link to its associated recording
• takes comments from your audience

Combine with a publishing schedule so your audience knows how often to expect a new recording. Stick to your schedule. A haphazardly published podcast is nobody’s friend.

Toss in release forms to cover the legal angle. You can get a release form from your university privacy office.

Contact your speakers (either directly or through their representatives) to ask if they agree to be recorded for your podcast. Let them know why you want to record and link them to your podcasting web page.

For each speaker, show up 5 – 10 minutes before talk time with your audio recorder and release form.

Start recording now. You’ll get several minutes of useless chatter but you can cut that out during the editing process. Never rely on your speaker to turn on or off the audio recorder. They have other things to worry about.

Ensure your audience knows you’re recording. Announce it before the speaker starts or write it on the whiteboard.

Stay for the talk or return right at the end to stop recording and pick up your audio recorder.

Next, record an introduction stating the:

• title of your podcast
• date the podcast will be published
• speaker’s name
• speaker’s topic
• speaker’s affiliation or credentials
• date the podcast was recorded

Record an outro directing your audience to your website, podcasting web page and any other information.

Mix your intro, recording and outro in your audio editing software. Ensure you cut out the empty bits before and after the talk. If you have time, listen to the whole talk and cut out the long pauses. Cut out audience questions at the end since you don’t have release forms for your audience and often the quality is poor. Keep the audience applause at the end since it’s a great segue into your outro.

Save and export your file. Make sure your file size is reasonable, say around 20 MB for a half hour and 30 MB for an hour.

Upload the file to your web server. Your RSS feed maker adds the new podcast to your feed. Test the feed and recording. Tell your speaker the recording is online (and ask for the presentation slides if you want to add them to the web page).

Enjoy!

Details, Details

In my department we have speakers giving talks on various topics all the time, sometimes several in a week. Our speakers include graduate students who are required to give a talk on their studies once a semester, visiting professors and our faculty. So if you have a similar set up, getting speakers will be a breeze.

I’m in a science department and our goal is to entice junior and school students to be interested in science. We started with recording graduate students and professors but quickly found that the topics they present to their peers are quite technical and not for a younger audience. So we invented a new speaker series, a popular science speaker series.

We united with our undergraduate student group for this new speaker series. The undergraduate student group chooses topics they are interested in (topics that are more accessible for the average citizen) and we acquire the speakers.

Now we publish two podcasts per month, one technical podcast from our pool of graduate students and professors, and one from our popular science series.

Don’t get discouraged if your podcast doesn’t get an audience right away. These things take time. Remember to advertise whenever you can, such as at your university open house or on your facebook group. And stick to your podcasting schedule. You lose audiences by not delivering.

What We Use

To record, we use an iPod Classic with a Belkin TuneTalk omnidirectional microphone. I just leave the iPod on a table near the speaker. The microphone is good enough to pick up sound if the speaker wanders around a bit.

However, the microphone picks up the whine of the iPod’s hard drive. I’d suggest getting a microphone that sits away from the iPod. We don’t use a wireless clip-on microphone because it’s more effort to get the speaker set up.

I use Audacity to edit and save the file as MP3. We built our own RSS feed maker, but it’s fairly easy to find one you can install… or just use a blog to create the feed.

I use Feedburner to deliver the RSS feed and get statistics. And finally, I added our podcast to iTunes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Podcasting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.