SoundCloud Aids Audio Students in Achieving High Grades

By Rob Brown

BLUE BELL, PA--Communication students taking audio production classes under the leadership and expertise of Montco Professor Morgan Betz understood the added responsibilities which would come with taking his classes. And if that “responsibility” translated into just “work” in these students, it did not even show in their efforts to put on a pair of headphones and submerse themselves into learning the skills that are taught through hands-on sound projects and allowing others outside the course to listen in on their luscious mixes of sound effects and musical instruments.

As a communication professor, Betz has observed that “social media interaction has become part of the college experience.” He continued, “Checking Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other sites, people do that as a habit,” yet “[they] are still going to school.”

But how does he inspire his students to tell their friends and followers about the audio projects they make in his class?  The solution is a website highly similar to YouTube, called SoundCloud.

The site allows subscribed users to upload their audio content in the same way that YouTube users can upload video.  Those users can then, as Diore Stewart, 18, of Abington, explained, “link [that content] to Twitter and Facebook…[and] anyone connected on a social network” to check out what they did. As student Dan Grundy, 19, from Lansdale, said, “[SoundCloud] is great to use especially for bands to post their music…so that they are not judged by their looks, but rather the way they sound.”

With SoundCloud, Stewart said, “it makes it easier for artists to edit stuff [and post it].  Now, you don’t need to pass out physical copies of your work.”

Professor Betz “checks on SoundCloud to see if everyone did their assignments,” Joffre Jaramillo, 35, of Conshohocken, said, describing his professor’s way of ensuring that he and his fellow classmates are up-to-date on their grades.  Jaramillo, who works in Technical Services at the College, preferred SoundCloud over previous methods of distributing audio recordings, primarily because it saves money in the long run; “burning CD’s” he said, “…is quite expensive, especially when you’re doing more than one file.” Comparing spending 50 cents for one CD in Tech Services versus posting files on social media, he added the latter “is definitely the future.”

With a younger generation of college students turning to social media and online media sites like YouTube, they still achieve high academic success in classes like Morgan Betz’s; this, according to a study conducted late last month, showed 56% of students, or 14 of 25 students surveyed, often go on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but an insignificantly less figure of 52% enter into YouTube and other online video sites, as well as utilizing college resources like the library to help students complete their course assignments; altogether, these three sites help achieve student success, with grade point averages commonly as low as a 2.0 and as high as a 3.9.

This study correlates with a prior sampling made by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project back in 2011, which concluded that community-college students between ages 18 and 24 “showed a slight edge” in Internet use over undergraduate and graduate students. These findings, featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education, revealed that “by comparison, only 75 percent of adults nationally report using the Internet.”

In other instances of the close relationship between online activity and success in the classroom, the professor cited “someone link[ing] a YouTube video on Facebook” and “checking their college email, which would have links to YouTube or Hulu videos.” Social media has become an enormous asset for people trying to land jobs in the production industry, as Dan Grundy explained that “they need to post their work to the Internet.”

Education – or in the case of Professor Betz, technology eduction – has changed how college students succeed and how often they use social media, particularly with the use of SoundCloud in his audio classes; he later noted that balancing social media and classwork “is lots of work for students, but they still manage,” adding that “I just don’t know if everyone’s doing it.”