As for recording a podcast of his own lectures, Grabowska says that for many of the courses he teaches the interactive nature of how he runs a classroom doesn’t lend itself to podcasting. You just sort of have to be there.

Other schools are way ahead of the podcasting game. Purdue University offers something called BoilerCast, a service that records and uploads lectures at an instructor’s request. At the University of Michigan, students in the dentistry program can have their lectures delivered to their computers or portable devices. The California Institute of Technology’s admissions office has released an 11-minute podcast for prospective students. Instructors at Stanford and Berkeley are podcasting lectures.

Even Gustavus Adolphus is getting on board. While the St. Peter college isn’t podcasting lectures yet, it is podcasting daily chapel services.

For the past six weeks, anyone anywhere in the world has had audio access to the spiritual musings of the Gustavus chapel crew. Rachel Larson, one of the campus chaplains, said the idea came from one of the college’s technology people, who said they were toying with the idea of podcasting various parts of the campus experience.

“While we would prefer everyone to come,” Larson said, “it seemed like a good outreach mechanism.”

Chapel services are very well attended. Some Wednesdays, traditionally the biggest day for chapel crowds, they may have 500-600 students, faculty and staff inside Christ Chapel at 10 a.m.

Larson says they discussed whether it would discourage people from attending, but in the end decided the good far outweighed the bad. For example, podcasting chapel services is a way to reach out to people in the community who aren’t physically able to make it to services, or to alums who live in different parts of the country or world but still yearn to hear the spiritual lessons available each day at chapel.

“We had a religion professor who, when he was still here, he was at chapel every day,” Larson says. “Now he can’t drive anymore. But (podcasted chapel services) will be available to him every day, and he can still be a part of it that way.”

We can, but

should we?

The podcasting horse is out of the barn. It’s going to be done. But is there a downside?

Grabowska says he’s been teaching an interactive course for several years. In this class, his booming voice goes out to the students sitting in front of him, as well as to a collection of students sitting in a classroom at St. Cloud State University via closed-circuit television.

It’s not podcasting, but an observation he’s made could apply to what might happen with a podcasted lecture.

“Students at remote sites suffered a loss because of a lack of contact,” he said. “They didn’t have the instructor in the room with them. They lacked a sense of a cohesive group you try to develop in a classroom.”

There’s also the issue of focus. During class, students presumably are paying attention to what the instructor is saying (wireless-connected laptops and PDAs notwithstanding). If they download a lecture and listen to it when they have time, the time they choose to listen may not be dedicated solely to learning.