Our “Podcasts as Pedagogy” project, which we co-led, brought together a group of researchers and students, including Fatih Aktas, Bahar Karaagacli, Kelsey Boivin, Phyllis Keyi Mensah, Injung Cho, and Tom Stonestreet. The project was funded by the British Association of Comparative and International Education, the University of Sydney Office of Global Engagement, and the University of Canberra’s Centre for Sustainable Communities. We conducted a scoping review of podcast literature, content analysis of FreshEd itself, and surveys of students, teachers, and the general public. Our approach revealed fascinating insights about podcasting as an educational medium.

What even is a Podcast?

The , published in the British Journal of Educational Technology, revealed a striking lack of definitional clarity in the field. Over 25 percent of academic papers about educational podcasts that we reviewed provided no definition at all of what they were studying. This may make sense given the evolving nature of podcasts. Can podcasts include video, as is popular today?  Are voice memos used as student feedback considered a podcast? And what about recorded interviews that are only accessible from within a Learning Management System? The boundaries of a “podcast” are hard to pin down. We attempted to define podcasts by mapping how they have been conceptualized across three main approaches: technological distribution, user experience, and audio medium. 

We also tried to define the term “educational” podcast. We did so by focusing on three pathways by which podcasts become “educational”: educator assignment, individual learning choice, and creator labeling. This allowed us to develop a taxonomy that captures evolving practices of podcast use in teaching and learning from substitutional lecture recordings to creative student-produced content. This was foundational work for our project and revealed insights about podcasting as an educational medium. It highlighted critical research gaps around representation, access, and the intersection of academic inquiry with audio storytelling, which we explored further.

FreshEd as a Mirror and Lens on the Field

Once we had our definitional and conceptual foundations set, we wanted to understand how podcasts impact academic fields. It’ll come as no surprise to readers that we focused on FreshEd and the field of comparative and international education. spanning seven years, which was published in Compare, revealed fascinating patterns about the comparative and international education field itself. While it mirrored familiar patterns in the field—that is, the prevalence of higher education research, the dominance of English-speaking institutions, the geographic concentration in Anglo-European contexts—it also offered something different. Unlike traditional journal articles that typically focus on single countries due to space and expertise constraints, most FreshEd episodes naturally referenced multiple contexts, opening new possibilities for comparative thinking.

Perhaps most significantly, our analysis revealed how podcasts such as FreshEd may be reshaping the “epistemic living space” of academic fields. The informal chat show format allows for connections across contexts that might be difficult to achieve in peer-reviewed articles, while the public accessibility of podcasts helps democratize knowledge that would otherwise remain behind academic paywalls.

Voices from the Field

The final, ongoing aspect of our research aims to understand how podcasts are used by teachers and students in higher education. Our survey research, which is not yet published, revealed nuanced perspectives from both students and educators about podcasts in learning. Students appreciated podcasts for their accessibility and diverse perspectives, often using them as tools for conceptual clarity and as welcome breaks from text-heavy coursework. However, they also noted challenges including difficulty with note-taking, limited referencing options, and questions about content depth, especially when compared to traditional academic sources.

Teachers showed enthusiasm for podcasts as creative assessment alternatives and tools for bringing expert voices into their classrooms, particularly valuing their potential to circumvent plagiarism concerns in the Generative AI era. Yet they also highlighted significant implementation barriers: crowded curricula, technical challenges, and the ongoing tension between innovation and institutional expectations.

Overall, the conversation about podcasts as pedagogy is just beginning, and we’re excited to continue exploring how this medium can transform teaching and learning in the years ahead.

Will Brehm is an Associate Professor in comparative and international education at the University of Canberra, where he is also the deputy director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Education. He hosts the FreshEd podcast, and for several years co-led a research project called “Podcasts as Pedagogy” with Matthew A.M. Thomas, who at the time was Head of the Department of Education Leadership and Policy at the University of Glasgow.