Long before the coronavirus pandemic prompted a harried rush by universities to move their operations online, developments in what we now call the “ed tech” industry — from massive open online courses (MOOCs), to the open university, to the published academic monograph — have tried to export the magic of the ivory tower to the outside world. But now, after decades of public disinvestment in higher education, the casualization of academic labor, and the drive to reduce the college experience to career training, scholars and media producers like Zachary Davis are asking: Can we use technology — specifically, podcasts — to keep that magic from dying?
From hosting the podcast Ministry of Ideas to becoming founder and president of Lyceum, a new platform for educational audio, Davis has emerged as a leading advocate for the power of podcasting to channel what is most valuable — sacred, even — in teaching. The Chronicle Review spoke with Davis about his path into the world of podcasts and about what educational technology can and can’t do.
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You’ve had an interesting path into the world of podcasting. How has your thinking and approach to educational audio developed as you’ve worked on different sides of the “industry”?
In 2012, I was one of the very first people hired at HarvardX, a new initiative dedicated to creating massive open online courses for the edX platform. For six years, I worked with professors to develop experimental online courses on subjects ranging from early Christianity to American government to Shakespeare. It was an extraordinarily exciting time, because we felt empowered to dream big about how technology could support learning and how it might make elite education more accessible to people around the world. The courses we made were extremely high quality in terms of media production, technological support, and educational substance — but, as anyone familiar with the story of MOOCs knows, we ended up with very low percentages of people who actually proceeded through the full courses, which raised questions about their effectiveness as tools of public education.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
Smash cut to 2014, when, like many Americans, I started listening to podcasts because everyone was talking about Serial and I wanted to check it out. After that, I was hooked. I started looking for new podcasts to listen to and, being of a philosophical bent, stumbled upon Philosophy Bites. I remember the pleasure of walking home from work and listening to an engaging conversation about Nietzsche — it was exquisite.
I started to think about all the extraordinary faculty I was getting to know at HarvardX and the Harvard Divinity School, where I was a graduate student, and wondered whether I shouldn’t start recording conversations with them and sharing them as well. In partnership with The Boston Globe, I began developing Ministry of Ideas, a podcast about intellectual history and cultural criticism where we cover topics from transhumanism to cannibalism. Creating the show was enormously rewarding. It was collaborative, requiring the skills of scholars, audio editors, composers, writers, and designers.
All the while, I was learning more about the dozens, even hundreds, of excellent podcasts emerging on nearly every academic discipline you could imagine. I’m a Mormon, so it’s basically instinct to build community. So, I decided to email some of the educational podcasters I was learning about to see if they wanted to come to Cambridge for a conference about educational audio — we called it “Sound Education.” We weren’t expecting much that first year, but the response was overwhelmingly positive, and we ended up welcoming more than 150 speakers and 500 attendees. The experience of meeting hundreds of educators who collectively teach millions of people through audio made me realize that something profound was underway with public education. For the first time in human history, we had the tools to take any teacher’s voice — not only the most famous — and share it with learners around the world.
Since Gutenberg, our regimes of knowledge have been dominated by the printed word. It was the best technology we had for sharing ideas and knowledge. I believe we are entering a new age, one when audio will play a much more significant role in how we acquire and distribute knowledge. Not only do we aesthetically prefer listening to the live human voice to dead words on a page, but audio recording and distribution is much easier and cheaper than journal or book publishing. There will always be a need for the more permanent preservation of knowledge in those forms, but podcasting offers us ways of sharing scholarly discourse and teaching that are more open, accessible, and emotionally engaging. Of course, audio works best for narrative and is ill-equipped for certain fields requiring visual reference. But for the humanities and much of the social sciences, audio can work even better than video, by allowing listeners to focus solely on the argument and narrative itself, rather than any distracting visuals. I think that podcasts actually better fulfill the hopes that many of us had for MOOCs.
What do you think we can do with podcasts that we couldn’t with MOOCs?
I think, first off, the MOOC hype cycle was mostly a media-manufactured event. Most of the university-based people involved in creating and developing these never wanted to replace any professors with them. We were excited by the large numbers of people that we were able to teach at scale, but we kept a healthy modesty about the impact. I do think, in general, there’s a temptation in our culture to see technology as a silver bullet that can magically fix the deeper challenges of transmitting knowledge and cultivating citizens. But technology will never be a silver bullet when it comes to education. Education will always require dedicated, creative, imaginative, loving teachers engaging with students directly.
I think the reason podcasting has been so successful so far is it lends itself to love, to that feeling of recognition when someone else is as enthusiastic about a topic or a work of art as you are.
The interest in MOOCs showed us that there are millions of people around the world who are excited about learning advanced subjects that higher-education institutions are able to teach. For some of the courses that I worked on, I would be moderating the discussion boards, and I’d meet just the most amazing people — from Zimbabwe, India, Brazil, and elsewhere — who were incredibly grateful for the chance to engage and learn with others around the world and occasionally even interact with the professors.
However, where I think MOOCs fall short somewhat is, for the most part, the format doesn’t really work for most lifelong or lower-income learners. The data suggests that it’s mostly older, mostly wealthier, mostly Western people who end up really going through these courses. And so, while most of us were initially motivated to try to help less fortunate people around the world receive valuable knowledge and information, in a way we were subsidizing education for people who already were in a position to gain and pay for that education. There was a bit of a disconnect between who we thought we would be helping and who, in fact, ended up benefiting more from these courses.
Another way that I think MOOCs fall short: They’re much more expensive than they need to be. A lot of effort was spent on video, and I just don’t think most subjects need video. You know, lectures are often maligned. But at their best, lectures are profoundly exciting things to listen to — they combine arguments and storytelling to reveal the world in ways that there’s no substitute for.
Covid-19 is probably going to lead to many colleges closing and many academics losing their jobs or not being able to find one in the first place (as if the job market weren’t bad enough already). What do you think the mission of educational podcasting needs to be in light of the crises we’re living through?
My work with Lyceum is certainly motivated by a desire to help universities use audio to carry their knowledge to more people around the world. But I’m also interested in how podcasting in general, and Lyceum in particular, can help scholars and educators who struggle at the margins of the academy — precarious adjuncts or lecturers, or those many Ph.D. graduates who, because of a lack of jobs, have been forced to take alt-ac or unrelated work to pay the bills. I would like to see Lyceum be a place where anyone who has knowledge and who wants to share that knowledge about a subject they love can record and distribute lectures and find eager students interested in what they are teaching. And, importantly, I want it to be a place where scholars can find dignity, community, and income regardless of how far they may sit from centers of power and prestige.
I live in Boston — in Cambridge — and Boston is lousy with adjuncts. I am close friends with many members of the academic precariat. And it has been really profoundly sad to watch how much they have struggled financially, but also emotionally, with the way the academic market is set up, where there are vanishingly few tenure-track jobs. I have been very frustrated watching the academy fail to address this crisis, essentially just offering lots of handwringing but very few bold steps to try to solve this. Covid-19 is only going to exacerbate these structural challenges and cause even more scholars to be denied a stable income and institutional home.
With Lyceum, I’m trying to do what little I can to address some of what I see as the problem. First, I think, more than anything, people really do need dignity. And being told that you are interchangeable with another adjunct, and that you and the knowledge you bring are replaceable at any time — that isn’t the kind of dignity that most of these wonderful thinkers and scholars deserve. I’m interested in creating an academic home that people can come to where they are wanted, where they are respected, and where they have control. This way, no administrator or search committee can tell you that you’re not good enough, that you’re not a scholar, that you don’t have something worth teaching.
One of the things that we’re creating is essentially a faculty of podcasters. We are gathering together and creating our own departments. We’re talking to one another via Slack, email, Zoom, and phone calls. In this terribly frightening time, we are looking for ways to provide sources of solidarity and emotional and material support. And we’re providing the mentorship, friendship, and mutual-care networks that a lot of these adjuncts — and all educators — desperately need.
I think that podcasts actually better fulfill the hopes that many of us had for MOOCs.
How do you see the medium of podcasting today carving a different path, one that’s distinct from all the flashy new tools coming out of the “ed tech” industry?
Anyone can start a podcast, anyone can distribute it to everyone else — it’s an open system. And, well, there are pros and cons to that openness: There are a million podcasts out there, and trying to wade through all the content is daunting. It’s overwhelming, frankly, which is partly why Lyceum is a curated project. We’re including only podcasts that, you know, are relatively good.
But the benefit of being open is that you don’t need gatekeepers to determine which projects are worth pursuing in the first place. And I think a lot of professors might agree with the fact that the academy sometimes does stifle creative pursuits, because you have to do what’s necessary to get tenure. And then, once you safely and carefully pursue tenure long enough, you might lose some of that capacity for creativity and boldness. Podcasting can let you do things that maybe are more interdisciplinary, maybe a little bit more public-facing, maybe a little more risky. And you can take your research to ordinary people, not just specialists, and it can be a way to make knowledge transmission more dialogic, especially if you create a conversation-based podcast.
Do you think podcasting could replace the credentialed higher-ed system that we have now?
I really support the four-year higher-education experience and the graduate-school experience. I think people should come together physically, learn together side by side, and actually have relationships with their professors. So, I’m resistant to anything that undermines that possibility.
I think the push to turn all education virtual is misguided. We need physical, embodied educational experiences. I don’t think podcasting and this educational audio world should seek to offer credentials. Instead we should seek to provide lifelong learners with the resources they need to continually grow intellectually, to be stimulated, and to find answers to deep questions about their life, their society, and their world. I also think it can help people learn about subjects that maybe they didn’t have time for earlier in life.
Most of the people that I know who are creating these podcasts are doing so because they love knowledge, they love learning, and they want to share that love with other people. And I think the reason podcasting has been so successful so far is that it lends itself to love, it lends itself to that feeling of recognition when someone else is as enthusiastic about a topic or a work of art as you are. And it lets you share, without outside pressures trying to dampen that love. And so, rather than competing with credentialed institutions, I think we have an opportunity with podcasts to create a space where you go to grow as a human, connect with other people, and cultivate new loves.
Where do you think this kind of dream — that never seems to go away — of ultimately eliminating the in-person, campus-based education experience comes from?
I think every person in the world should have at least a four-year university experience. And I get really frustrated and angry when people keep saying, “Well, we can’t afford education. It’s too expensive. We need to cut costs by turning it digital so you can just go straight into the work force and maybe get an online education along the way.”
I think universities are the best idea that humans have ever had. And that idea is under attack by a certain neoliberal logic that, for some reason, can’t imagine that “inefficient” things are actually the most valuable things of all. It is inefficient to spend four years reading and discussing. But it’s what makes us richer, more nourished, and more capable human beings. So we should actually be fighting any kind of big push to eliminate in-person education in favor of virtual. Instead we should see educational media like podcasting as a powerful supplement — and as a way to keep the joy of education alive for one’s whole life.
I want to see a world in which we make universities free for anyone who wants to go, we dramatically expand the number of tenure-track professors, and we provide a podcast mic to every educator in the world so that they can share what they love with anyone who needs it, anywhere they are.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
