Teaching in front of the microphone: is it business as usual?

Solomon Kimani Kabonoki
University of Botswana
Botswana

For the last seven years, the Centre for Continuing Education of the University of Botswana has developed and recorded more than 90 audio instructional tapes in one of its courses offered by distance mode. The target group for these instructional materials is trained primary school teachers taking an upgrading course by distance mode. The development and production model used requires that the content material is written by a content expert, reviewed by another content expert, and then an audio instruction specialist comes in to convert the written content into listening content. The model also requires that the final script is read by the writer -- the content expert. Since there is little guidance in the literature about a standard duration of recorded audio instructions, this case study was geared towards establishing guidelines in this area to improve practice.

Our survey in monitoring students' reactions about recorded audio instructions indicated that some students complained that the lecturers were fast. This case study investigated how lecturers react while presenting their audio scripts inside a recording studio by looking at their presentation speeds. There are differing figures of presentation speeds in the literature and it was of interest to establish where we fitted in our context -- with a view to solving the problem of fast lecturers. It was also of interest to compare reading speeds of lecturers 'on the microphone' with the presentation speeds of classroom lecturers appearing in the literature.

The case study revealed that under our writing and production model, durations of most of the recording (67.7%), were between 17 minutes long and 24 minutes long. The case study also revealed that the presentation speed for lecturers in our context was between 100 ­ 120 words per minute and that the mean speeds for individual lecturers were significantly different at p<0.05 level. Further, the speed curves indicated a need for lecturers to rehearse intensely to achieve a stable presenting speed that yielded conversation-like teaching, meaning that teaching on the microphone is not business as usual.