I used to work for a company called ChinesePod. I bring it up a lot because I enjoyed working there and learned a lot, but also because I really believe that they were using podcasts for a practical and beneficial purpose: Education.

When it comes to education, podcasting has a lot to offer. They’re easy to record, so anyone who has something to teach can do it. They can be distributed to all corners of the planet at zero cost, so the world is your classroom. They are extremely portable, so you can learn anywhere. You can pause or rewind, so you can learn on the go whenever is convenient for you, and stop to think whenever you need to. They don’t take any storage space, so students can store all their lessons forever. They are usually released along side a blog, so all the learners can converge and discuss the material. And, particularly with bite-sized podcasts, you can learn in small chunks and pick and choose what’s important.

I’m reading more and more about universities, high schools, and even elementary schools getting into podcasting. One of my favorite examples is the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Podcast. At Stanford they have weekly seminars with some of the worlds most exciting entrepreneurs. All they do is record the seminars and put them on an RSS feed and voila, a podcast! But now instead of being a cool seminar that students of Stanford can attend IF they happen to have the time on Friday afternoons, these seminars become a way for the entire planet to learn and grow from an archive of lectures taught by the best of the best. It’s also a now a easy reference for anyone who went to the seminar and wants to refer back to something that was said. It’s also a historical record of great business men and women speaking about their ideas and dreams for the future, like the one from Marc Zuckerberg in 2005 before anyone in Canada ever knew about Facebook. It’s also a way for Stanford to get the world excited about their school.

Another great example is Grammar Girl. This is an example of just a regular girl who knows a lot about grammar, now teaching thousands upon thousands of learners every day with bite-sized, easily referenced, grammar tips, and making piles of cash from ads. Now you’ll find all sorts of Grammar Girl style podcasts, branded with “quick and dirty tips” almost like the “for dummies” of the 90s.

Coming back to ChinesePod, language learning through podcasts has really taken off, and for good reason. Not just the “lesson” style language podcasts, but any bite-sized English podcast makes a great tool for English language learners. Whenever I introduce our site to someone who has English as a second language, one of the first comments I get is how great these are as a free resource for practicing their English listening skills.

If you have a great bite-sized learning podcast, be sure to submit it to our directory and leave a comment here! I’ll be happy to put it into my daily splice and review it in our podcast!