Reading Books With Your Ears

Reading Books With Your Ears

THE SPECTACULAR WORLD OF SOUND AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE OF OUR STUDENTS

by Daniel Flores Bueno PhD (c) Faculty Innovation Fellows candidate Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas

In the last 15 years of experience as a professor in the area of Humanities, I have witnessed how the printed books of the course I teach have been progressively losing readers. This problem does not only respond to the reality of the university where I work, but it has to do with a global change produced by the emergence of new technologies. Nicholas Carr explains this in the book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains1 . The New media are altering our cognitive processes, attention and concentration, which are necessary for learning. Faced with this problem, researchers globally have raised several questions. In 2019, approximately two hundred researchers from areas related to the fields of reading, literacy and publishing worked on a paper on the evolution of reading in the age of digitalization2. While this research clarified some unknown aspects that existed between print and digital text; it was clear that there is still an unknown gap ideal for educational innovation researchers. However, one of the conclusions was that our students needed to develop a bi-literate reading brain that could take advantage of the best of both digital and traditional media. With this in mind, in the last months, we have decided to turn this problem into an opportunity for innovation in the course of “Globalization: cultural and economic approach” of the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas. Therefore, we have worked within the Stanford Faculty Champion framework, a solution that allows our students to access our readings both in printed text format and audiobooks through mobile technologies such as Spotify. This is intended to help those who find it difficult to decode a printed text, but who have sufficient motivation to learn. In this group there may be students with certain learning disabilities such as dyslexia, attention deficit, and a long etcetera. The aim of this project has not been to create an audio book platform on Spotify to replace the reading of printed books, as it is clear that it provides the conditions for the development of certain mental functions necessary in higher education. On the contrary, the focus is on being a means that serves as a complement so that students who for various reasons are able to read long texts, do not miss the opportunity to go through the ideas developed by the authors seen in class. To carry out this project, the first thing we did was to record all the readings of the course supported by two homemade technologies: an Apogee Mic Plus USB, a microphone of studio quality purchased on Amazon.com, and an Apple iPad Air 2 with an audio editing software called Rode REC, in which we were able to work not only the editing but also on the post production. With these two accessories we have converted all the printed books into digital audios that we have published on a platform called Anchor, which allows us to distribute in a very simple way all our audiobooks through a Podcast channel called “Radar Investiga” on Spotify. What has been the response from students and what impact has it had on improving their learning? To answer the first question, we conducted some initial exploratory surveys. First, we wanted to find out if the students had a mobile device and if they were familiar with the Spotify platform. These polls were conducted randomly in different classrooms. The results showed that almost 100% of the student population of the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas in the courses “Globalization: cultural and economic approach”, from 2021 - 2022 have at their disposal a smartphone. Likewise, almost 90% of these students were familiar with the Spotify application, which means the location of the Radar Investiga podcast is ideal and facilitates rapid distribution of content. Regarding its use, a survey was conducted with 417 students from the same course. They were first asked for consent to participate in the research. 331 (79.4%) said that they agreed to participate. This allowed us to discover that 20.7% of them listened to the first reading of the course in its entirety only through the audio book”. Meanwhile, 18.2% reported that they read and listened to the reading and 42.2% said they only read it. These results show how the audio book can be a complementary tool to the printed text. We came to this conclusion because there is a group of students who listen and read simultaneously, as a form of aid to decoding.

Another important point has been note taking as a way to consolidate learning, which is common in people who have a habit of reading. 51.9 % of the people surveyed stated that they read and at the same time make notes, summaries or annotations. The number was notably lower in those who only listened, reaching only 28.4% out of a universe of 391 respondents. This means that there is a group of students who seek to access information quickly, but are not familiar with processing techniques through note-taking, summarizing or mind mapping. That gives us an opportunity to train them in these methodologies so they can improve their learning through audiobooks.

To conclude, we agree with one of the conclusions made by the research of Singh & Alexander3. In this systematic review of the literature, it is stated that there is no definite yes or no regarding the positive impact of audio books on learning, but that it will depend on several factors. This means that there is still a lot of research and experimentation to be done. We are on that path.