Starting from the beginning, we wanted to work together on coming up with the overall structure and argument for the podcast while delegating more specific tasks for each member. Laurie, the main producer, was in charge of interview Professor Yoojin while I was in charge editing and putting the podcast together. After Laurie finished the interview, the three of us sat together to listen to it while noting important comments that she said throughout in order to create an ABT structured around the interview. In the first group’s podcast, we noticed that humor made it more interesting, which gave us inspiration to include some of the funnier parts of the interview to better engage the listener. Further, the second group’s podcast was an interview that was very conversational which was an aspect that we wanted to include as well to better connect the listener with the content. Different than the previous groups, we wanted to make the podcast more structured, specifically following our ABT structure to make the overall argument clearer and more easily understood.
Through our podcast, my goal is to convey how the pandemic has reshaped education from both a student and teacher experience. As students, it was a drastically different education than anything we have experienced before as we all transitioned to remote learning. However, for professors, it was also a new territory having to teach completely online and for some, in a country across the world. Because of the impact the pandemic has had on education, I wanted to explore more into the perspective of professors and the challenges they experienced leading to a new focus on the importance of non-verbal communication. By incorporating the interview, listeners are able to hear the difficulties associated with remote teaching directly from a professor while making it more conversational and humorous. With this relaxed tone, the podcast felt more natural and had a better flow. While the organizing and planning process were more streamlined, I faced some roadblocks during the editing process. This difficulty mostly arose from my lack of experience with audio editing software, in this case Audacity. It took me time to learn how to use the major tools of the program and play around with it to be more comfortable with editing the final podcast. The quality of the sound was also difficult to work with to achieve my goal of a more natural transition which took a lot more time than expected. Due to this, I edited in softer music to transition between different points for both a more natural shift and to indicate to the listener.
Two of the biggest learning outcomes that I met during the process were rhetorical composition and collaboration. Due to the nature of a podcast being a pure verbal argumentation, it was important to have a clear purpose while incorporating in bits of humor so the listeners would still be engaged. From this experience, I saw the importance of Randy Olson’s ABT format in defining a clear argument which greatly helped with the organization of our podcast. Despite being a podcast, I saw similarities to a traditional essay in that we are collecting evidence, or interview responses, to support our overarching ABT-style argument. Previously, I did not have much exposure to the ABT structure, but especially after this podcast, it is something that I will continue applying to essays or pieces of writing in other classes as well.
Even though there were challenges in the editing process as I mentioned above, the rest of the podcast planning and structuring process went more smoothly because of our collaboration. By working together to come up with ideas on our ABT and how to format our podcast, we were able to combine our thoughts to form a more nuanced yet concise argument. Without Stella’s and Laurie’s input, we would not have created this complete podcast so I would like to thank both of them for all the hard work they put into this.
Crystal Wang 
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