I’m really excited to be saying this right now.

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Welcome to the 1-9-2 Chronicles, a podcast series showcasing fantastic student-designed podcast episodes from a course at the University of Toronto Mississauga. The course is called Thinking Badly, but it’s more commonly referred to as Misinformation in the Information Age. It’s a course that explores issues with science communication and how those issues lead to public mistrust. The course works with two broad lenses—medicine and climate change—though student assignments can extend well beyond the scope of these two lenses.

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All the students who designed these podcasts are first-year learners. This was the first time that I did a podcast assignment, and, to be honest, I wasn’t sure how it would go. It’s not that I didn’t trust the students; they’re great. It’s more that podcasts are intricate beasts. There is a large degree of technological know-how that needs to stich into so many more competencies. Could a good academic podcast episode come out of an undergraduate research project? Would the episodes still be entertaining and enjoyable for students to assemble even if they’re a course project? Or—my biggest fear—would they all come out sounding like they were reading a research paper in a submarine?

My worries were useless. The students knocked it out of the park, which is why I’m so darn excited to be sharing this with you all now. Some of the episodes I received were of a professional grade. They’re all entertaining. They’re all well-informed, and they balance sharing information with engaging an audience. It’s beautiful to see them all come together so well.

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It might help to have a little project background. This assignment was a capstone for the course, and it built on work students had done all semester. They’d already completed a scoping literature review on their scientific subject of choice, and they designed a research report. The reports were supposed to be 12 pages, and most students went well past this mark because they had so much to say (by the way…thanks for that, folks :P).

Students were then asked to group together (in groups of 2 or 3) and design a single podcast episode where they would teach each other (and a wider audience) about their individual research topics. Each project would get 15-20 minutes of airtime.

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So most of these episodes run between 40 and 60 minutes, though some run a bit longer—what can I say? It’s a loquacious group. True scholars through and through.

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I developed a series of video modules to help students map the podcast design to the rubric. This way they could engage in multimodal communication design without missing the important parameters of their research. The modules also addressed how to make podcasts accessible and how to work as a group.

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The results were so beautiful that I couldn’t just let them fade into the darkness of a course shell. With an eye towards learning about research dissemination, I decided to build out this space to publish the episodes. Publication was completely optional, and all members of the group had to be in agreement on publishing.

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Eight groups decided to publish their episode, which was more than I could have dreamed of publishing. We have such an eclectic mix of topics: we have discussions about mental health, peer review, artificial intelligence, medicine, skincare, sunscreen, science and legal cases, Theranos, GMOs (a whole freaking episode about GMOs that is absolutely delightful!), vaccines, nuclear power, autism spectrum disorder, Alzheimer’s, Tylenol, CRISPR, and herd behaviour.  Somehow each episode pulls things together as part of the same tapestry.

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I could go on all day. But this isn’t about me. It’s about the students who made this all possible. So thank you, folks, for all the work you put into this. Thank you for your enthusiasm and for your incredible engagement. Thank you for being vulnerable and putting your work out there.

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I’m out.