The pandemic has meant that part of my teaching this term is going online. We're pivoting the lecture to a radio show and I couldn't be more excited to return to something that was a big part of my life 10-15 years ago. Thankful for @lindgrenmia's teaching all those years ago!

An update on this: we’re 3 weeks in and it’s so refreshing to teach in this way! I think it's worth explaining about more about the shift in format and some of the reasons behind it. And also highlight some (small) pitfalls we've encountered along the way.

The course is called Navigating Complexity (Navcom for short) and it's in the 1st semester of our 2 yr MSc Digital Innovation and Management. It's chunky - there's lots of theory, reading, writing and doing. We're giving students the skills to well, navigate complexity.

It's 2x 2hr lectures with 2x 2hr exercises (read: tutorial/seminar) per week. Covid restrictions on building capacity meant that 1 of these sessions had to be online. We were all feeling zoom fatigue and guessed that our students might be too.

During the lockdown, I'd been thinking about how radio might work as a distance education format. In particular, I was thinking more basically, how I could use the timing and rhythm of a talk radio show within a zoom lecture to make it drag less.

At this stage (before summer), we didn't know what teaching would look like, so there was no point planning something elaborate. But there's always benefit in just having an idea ticking along in the back of your mind.

A few weeks before term started, our course manager tentatively asked the teaching team what we thought of turning a lecture into a 2 hour radio show (broadcast on zoom). We all were on board - at the very least, it's an interesting experiment.

So Navcom Radio was born! Here @ITUkbh we are lucky enough to have studios, equipment and learning support staff ( @runekj) who could get us up and running and troubleshoot the technical side of things before the first show. (logo from @kaisirlin)

(weird side note: over the summer part of ITU moved into some office space that used to belong to the Danish national broadcaster, including some recording studios, so we got *super* lucky to have broadcast quality space to play in)

I jumped into radio producer mode to sketch out an outline of what those two hours of content might look like. Where to put segments, songs and news at the top of the hour, of course :)

I also dug out my old writing for radio training book from when I worked at the ABC. This was really helpful to share with colleagues who have had to go from being lecturers to radio presenters overnight. Academic writing and radio writing are different genres of communicating.

The dynamics of a lecture and a radio show are different. And what you achieve with each format also differs. Both are live, but the radio format affords you a more approachable, less formal tone. It also allows students to ask questions more fearlessly.

We have two TAs ( @KristofferKloch & Asger) who do an amazing job of doing the live production of each show. One takes care of making us sound good, another is the vital link between us and our student-listeners, who ask us questions via chat.

What works well: 1) we've really gone all in on the radio format, keeping it conversational. Having 2 academics discussing the week's content in a chat format works super well and makes for good listening. Our course manager has appointed himself newsreader which is just great!

2) The questions we get from students are thoughtful, generative and so different from q's in a lecture. And while they often put us on the spot, I feel as though the conversation that comes from it is so, so rich. It wouldn't be half the radio show it is without their input.

3) Personally, I'm finding it so enjoyable to get to know my colleagues and their work in new and interesting ways. For instance, I wouldn't have known about @pedro2_0 's research on long distance cycling if we hadn't co-hosted a show together last week.

4) Oh and stickers! We have limited-edition Navcom Radio stickers of the logo you saw a few tweets up. It's a 'stickers or it didn't happen' kind of situation around here.

What's been challenging: 1) we've had some minor technical gremlins, but they've always been overcome without taking us off-air. We even managed to theorise our gremlins in our 2nd show with @_linehenriksen_

2) Music has been a challenge turned into some lols. We need music to act as breaks but there's no obvious copyright clearance category for what we're doing so we can't play mainstream music. So we're making incredibly good use of the Free Music Archive.

3) Live radio is unpredictable and fluid so it's quite tricky for students to take notes. What's great is that they're telling us this, so we're figuring out solutions while not tipping it back into a lecture. Show notes ahead of time, recordings afterwards seem to be 1 option.

So yeah, that's my thread about our radio as teaching adventure. We're learning as we're going and we have other things to try later in the term. I appreciate that it's not necessarily an option that's available to everyone, esp with time and resources being short.

(but am I still as excited as I was in that initial tweet? Yep. I'm Navcom Radio's biggest hype woman)