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Podcasting for Undergraduate Healthcare Education

In this era of rapid technological advancement it is not surprising that education is changing and evolving along with the wider use of new technology by the general public. Podcasting has become one of the major emergent technological trends and was chosen by the New Oxford American Dictionary in 2005 as the Word of the Year. A search of Google for the word ‘podcasting’ revealed over 56 300 000 hits on the day of writing this review. Podcasting is rapidly becoming an established phenomenon and it has also now started to be used in healthcare education. We outline in this article the nature of podcasting and describe the results of a review of the published literature to identify how podcasting was being used for undergraduate healthcare education. We have chosen this particular group of learners since we were impressed by the high use of podcasting by first year medical students. Our recent survey of 86 students at the University of Leeds identified that at least 60% downloaded podcasts weekly and that 21% had a regular subscription to a podcast provider. We were interested in identifying the potential use of podcasting for undergraduate healthcare education and also identifying areas for further research and development.