by John Helmer, podcast producer and consultant, UK
Working across both workplace and educational sectors, with most of my attention given to the former, I too often make the lazy assumption that the bleeding edge of practice must be in corporates. So the first big surprise I encountered while writing a recent paper on audio learning was that, by several measures, higher and vocational education, particularly in Northern Europe, are further along with podcasting than corporates.
A second, more gradual surprise was how incurious most people seemed about the distinctive strengths and shortcomings of this relatively young modality. Surely it is better at some things than others? Yet the question usually posed is a general one: does podcasting work for learning? I’m not sure we would ask that of any other medium.
With video, text, lectures or simulations, we accept that each has its upsides and downsides, and we talk about ‘blending’ or ‘orchestrating’ them. Nobody expects one medium to do everything. Yet when podcasting enters the picture, we somehow expect it to substitute like-for-like for something we were already using – even as a wholesale replacement for a course.
So I think we need to change the question. The useful one is: which learning outcomes does audio fit, and which does it not? That one has an answer, and it is more specific than I expected.
Where audio is strong. Spoken conversation carries ideas, arguments, judgement, worked reasoning and stories well. It also reaches portions of a learner’s time – travelling, dog-walking, washing up – that screen-based media can’t, which matters a lot for learners who are not at a desk all day.
We should be careful, though, how we justify it with learning theory. Richard Mayer’s modality principle is sometimes offered in support of audio, and it is easy to see why: people do learn better from narration with graphics than from on-screen text with graphics. But that is a finding about how to combine channels within multimedia, not a finding that audio on its own outperforms anything else.
Where is podcasting weak, then? Audio shares one particular downside with video: transience. My podcast co-host, learning theory maven Donald Clark, puts it vividly: ‘our minds move through video like a shooting star, where the memories burn up behind us.’ Spoken material likewise disappears as it is delivered. A listener cannot slow it down, re-read a sentence, or scan back to a definition without an effort that itself costs attention.
John Sweller and colleagues call this the ‘transient information effect’, and it predicts with some precision what audio will handle badly: procedures, sequences, numbers, definitions, anything that has to be got exactly right. If your content is a laboratory protocol or a safety procedure, audio is probably the wrong instrument.
The strongest case I found in higher education was one I did not expect. Meyer and Land’s threshold concepts – ideas such as ‘opportunity cost’ in economics or ‘gravity’ in physics, which are troublesome, transformative and irreversible – look like unusually good territory for audio, for three reasons.
First, if a short text summary could explain the concept, it would not be troublesome. Second, hearing an expert work through the difficulty aloud, including the wrong turns, models the process of engaging with it. That is close to what a tutorial does, and expensive to scale by any other means. Third, liminality – being stuck part-way across – is isolating, because students in that position generally believe they are the only ones. Hearing others describe being stuck normalises it: an affective intervention on a cognitive problem, and affect is something audio is good at.
Thomas and colleagues’ 2025 scoping review in the British Journal of Educational Technology, which mapped 91 publications, adds a practical finding: supplementary use consistently outperformed substitutive use. Podcasts alongside teaching helped. Podcasts replacing teaching produced mixed to poor results.
In vocational education the European Qualifications Framework offers a way of putting it precisely. Of the EQF’s three dimensions, podcasting maps strongly onto responsibility and autonomy, partially onto cognitive skills, and not at all onto practical skills. Responsibility and autonomy – judgement, professional conduct, knowing what to do when nobody is telling you – is learned largely by exposure to people who already have it. A podcast interview series is just that. And it crosses the school–workplace gap in a way timetabled teaching cannot: the same material reaches the Berufsschule and the employer.
One production note, for the Media Production and Technology SIG. Most of us chop episodes into chapters and break them up with music for essentially aesthetic reasons. Singh, Marcus and Ayres found that segmenting spoken text reduces the transient information effect. So it is an instructional decision as well as an aesthetic one.
None of this adds up to a case for podcasting everywhere. But where the outcome and the medium fit each other, the evidence for what good looks like is stronger than most people assume.
The full paper, Should Podcasting Be Part of Your Learning Mix?, is free to read and download, with no registration, at johnhelmerconsulting.com.
References
Helmer_Podcasting_for_learning_MLA_references
Author
John Helmer is a podcast producer, host and consultant specialising in audio for learning, and the host of The Learning Hack and Great Minds on Learning. johnhelmerconsulting.com