Continuing Studies: for Higher Ed Podcasters

Rebecca Barry: When I was at UVA and attended my first academic conference, I thought it was so cool that I knew I wanted to run a conference of my own someday.

And this seemed like the perfect opportunity to take part in something that was completely virtual, open to people around the world, and connecting them about a concept I love, which is podcasting.

Neil McPhedran: Welcome to Continuing Studies, a podcast for higher education podcasters to learn and get inspired.

I'm Neil McPhedran, founder of Podium Podcast Company.

Jennifer-Lee: And I'm Jennifer-Lee, founder of Jpod Creations, podcasting is broadcasting.

We want you to know you're not alone.

In fact, there are many of you higher ed podcasters out there.

And we could all learn from each other.

Neil McPhedran: That's right, Jen.

Before we jump into this episode, we just want to encourage you to join the Higher Education Podcaster community at HigherEdPods.com.

Speaking of which, Jen, we've got something super exciting to share in this episode.

And if you're listening, you're hearing it like super early.

Jennifer-Lee: This is something you and I talk about with other university podcasters a lot, and it's finally coming to fruition.

Neil McPhedran: So we are teaming up with the Ed Up podcast.

Greg and I were just actually on that podcast a couple days ago, actually.

And we are creating the first ever Higher Ed PodCon.

We're in the planning stages of the first ever, first of its kind, higher education podcast conference.

And this is going to be for all of you listening, working in and around higher education who are interested in
learning about, maybe you're starting a podcast, but really more probably talking to those who already have podcasts.

And we are thinking probably it's looking that we're zeroing in and really close to officially announcing in Chicago, in the second week of July of this year.

So the second week of July, 2025.

Our emails, as you know, are in the show notes.

So if you are interested in participating in any way, just reach out to us via email.

Jennifer-Lee: Yeah.

Neil McPhedran: Super excited.

Jennifer-Lee: We're really excited because I guess it's something that we talk about every conference because there's not really a track specific to higher education podcasts.

So the fact that we are going to be part of one, this is awesome.

Neil McPhedran: Jen and I are talking about doing a couple of live episodes there, so we could interview you in person if you're interested.

Jennifer-Lee: We could.

As we know, there's so many great university or just higher education podcasts out there around the world.

Neil McPhedran: Yes.

So Jen, in this episode, which is actually a really interesting segue to a good timing into who we're talking to here, when
we just announced the Higher Ed PodCon, we're talking with Rebecca Barry and she is with the Humanities Podcast Network.

And so we're going to get into that a little bit more, but Rebecca Barry is the Illinois Scholars of Risk Program Coordinator at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.

She was at Yale previously, and now she's just recently moved over to the University of Illinois.

But that whole time she's been with the Humanities Podcast Network.

Jennifer-Lee: Yeah, so we ask her the very important question, why create a Humanities Podcast Network?

Neil McPhedran: And the other thing, Jen, that's really cool is the Humanities Podcast Network just had a few months ago, their fourth symposium.

So that's an online symposium of humanity podcasters who are part of the network and it's a way for them to reach beyond their network as well, too.

So we get into that as well.

So really cool to hear from them.

And gotta be honest, in our first year of Higher Ed PodCon, I definitely was thinking about some questions to ask them because this has been bubbling in the background.

So with that, let's get into it.

Welcome, Rebecca.

It's great to have you here on the Continuing Studies podcast.

Rebecca Barry: Thank you so much.

It's great to be here.

Jennifer-Lee: Yeah, I'm really excited about this conversation.

Neil McPhedran: We've been chatting with a few networks as of late.

Jennifer-Lee: But not a humanities network.

Usually they are like, networks that encompass all different topics.

But this one is super niche.

It's just humanities.

And I want to know, Rebecca, why humanities?

Rebecca Barry: You know, Jen, I gotta be honest with you.

I think we see it as all encompassing.

If podcasting is about humans, then it gets to be a humanities podcast.

You'd be surprised by how many people come to the symposium, and they do have things that are related to STEM, things that are related to mathematical inquiry.

But we also have people in history, classics, English, people who are telling the stories of immigrants, people who are telling the stories of their families.

We pretty much run the gamut, and I think that's been a great strength of the organization, in fact.

Neil McPhedran: Rebecca, maybe just sort of as a bit of a backstory, tell us about, like, what's your day job?

I'm assuming this isn't your full time gig, and how did you actually get into podcasting?

Rebecca Barry: Yeah, and I wouldn't say that podcasting is my full time gig, either.

I have just started last month a brand new job.

I'm at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign as their Illinois Scholars at Risk Program Coordinator.

What that means is we are helping people who are in war torn countries or countries where they're facing political persecution come and be visiting professors for a couple of years.

These are people with PhDs who, I mean our current ten scholars are from places like Ukraine, Gaza, Guatemala, Venezuela, Cameroon.

So my job is to help arrange all of the program coordination and logistics to make sure that they can
safely make it over to the US, that they have academic contributions that they can make to the school.

Often they're both participating in research and labs and working on publications while teaching.

It's been an incredibly rewarding experience and I'm really proud of what University of Illinois is doing.

Ten is a lot of scholars to host at once in this category.

And we're also looking ahead to helping them find placement so that they can transition either into the academic market or find a good fit going forward.

Jennifer-Lee: Congratulations.

That's awesome.

Rebecca Barry: Thank you.

Neil McPhedran: That's amazing.

That sounds like an amazing gig.

Rebecca Barry: Well, I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that as a part time podcaster, I've been bouncing around both in academia and outside.

I'm sure you meet a lot of people like that.

I was a teacher for seven years, including in China, Belgium, and on the East Coast.

I'm originally from Illinois, so I'm back home and my parents are very happy with that.

I got involved in podcasting in 2019 because I had just come back to the US, taught for a few years, and realized that teaching wasn't making me happy anymore.

And I sat down and interviewed twenty of my fellow teachers and said, is this the way you remember teaching being when you grew up or when you were at first in training?

Because I felt like in the ten years between when I had been trained and when I was teaching in the classroom, something had fundamentally changed.

So I have this incredible time capsule, these twenty interviews with teachers from 2019, right before we knew everything was going to change.

Neil McPhedran: Oh my goodness, you've got to do something with that.

Rebecca Barry: I know I do, it's, oh man, so the mini series is coming out someday.

Neil McPhedran: Yeah, that's incredible.

Rebecca Barry: In the meantime, while experimenting with that, during the pandemic, I created a little indie podcast with my family called The Barry Bunch Pics Flicks.

It's just me, my dad, and my brothers.

Neil McPhedran: Great name.

Rebecca Barry: The Barry family getting together, reviewing movies and TV shows.

Don't tell my dad this, but I did this because the only way he talks about his emotions is in the context of movie trivia, so I'm kind of tricking him into talking about it with me as well.

It was a great experience.

And then I went back to get my master's degree at University of Virginia in their English program.

I saw a summer internship opportunity to launch a new podcast with a law school called Legal Knowledge, and I got it.

And it was a phenomenal experience.

I learned Adobe Audition inside out.

I really saw what it looked like to take history scholarship and translate it into a narrative format.

I think, Jen, this kind of gets to your question about humanities podcasting because I felt that my historian colleagues were bringing like, we've got to get the facts right.

We've got to state the date and the name of the people at every sentence.

And I was bringing the, no, people want to connect with the story.

They want to know, you know, the personalities and the tensions behind the history.

And so the perfect marriage of those, I think.

made the podcast as successful as it was.

I then landed a second internship with UVA called Democracy in Danger.

It was an international news podcast.

We won a Webby in my time there.

It was an incredible experience.

Thank you.

I had, I was very lucky to be working with Roberto Armengol, who's one of NPR Backstories founders and a great team of professors and undergraduates who teamed up with us.

And then I finished my time at UVA.

My husband was finishing up his PhD at Yale University.

I landed a job with their School of Management Executive Education Program.

That had nothing to do with podcasting, but I kept telling people on the side, you know, I also podcast.

And about a year into that job, they were like, we're thinking of starting a podcast, do you want to edit it?

So that turned into Long Life Learning, which was a six episode season one series that might be coming back in the spring, cross your fingers.

And I have been thrilled to be able to incorporate podcasting to so much of my life.

So if you're listening at home and you're thinking, oh, I work a day job.

How do I break into this?

Just keep telling people that you are a podcaster.

Give it a year.

Neil McPhedran: Love it.

It's true though.

I think Jen and I can, well, Jen has a radio background, so it's a little bit different, but I, that's how I did.

I just put up my hand one day and said, I'm a podcaster and here I am six years later.

Rebecca Barry: That's incredible.

Neil McPhedran: Yeah.

That's the way it is.

So, must've been through UVA then, but first and foremost, like I just want to circle back on that.

Like there is some incredible podcasting stuff coming out of that university.

You know, we talked to MG and Sage and it was just, it's quite, like, once you sort of peel back the onion on that University, it's quite incredible, the podcasting scene there.

But, so, was that your connection then to the Humanities Podcast Network, which I like on the website, it's called HumPodNet, by the way.

Rebecca Barry: Thank you.

Yeah, it is.

And I want to be clear that I'm not one of the Humanities Podcast Network founders.

They were founded back in about 2021.

A bunch of podcasting academics went to an MLA conference.

They were on the same panel and they sort of connected and said, why aren't more people in academia taking podcasting seriously as a mode of scholarly inquiry?

And from that, uh, discussions and this organization were born.

I didn't join until about June 2023.

I was very lucky.

There's a Charlottesville local podcaster, Annie Galvin, who helps run the Ezra Klein show, who hooked me up and said,
I know about this group that I think would be really good networking and just conversation and camaraderie for you.

And she was the one who connected me with John Plotz at Brandeis University, one of the founders.

And then I've worked really close with people like Milan Terlunen and Kim Adams, um, who are also with the HPN.

And if I could comment really quickly, Neil, on your earlier comment with regard to UVA being such a wonderful hub of podcasting,
I want to give UVA a special compliment for incorporating people who work on podcasts at every level and dynamic of power.

It's not just faculty making podcasts in a vacuum.

It is faculty collaborating staff, collaborating with postdocs and visiting scholars who are collaborating with grads and undergrads.

And I think that is such an incredibly rich and powerful system to uphold.

I will say I've worked at other institutions where if a faculty member says, I want to make a podcast, the university coughs up money to hire a third party freelancer who does it.

And there's no involvement with students and staff and other members at all.

And I'm not knocking it.

There's a lot of freelancers out there that need that work.

You got to make it a community effort if you want it to be sustainable and if you want it to be impactful.

And I really appreciate the way that UVA always prioritize that.

Neil McPhedran: I love that, what you said there, that's excellent.

So maybe just let's, let's dig into a little bit more about, uh, Humanities Podcast Network.

Is there an audience for it or is it really just the podcasters or is there sort of another sort of outward audience for this network as well?

I would imagine it's sort of two, there's, it's twofold there.

Rebecca Barry: Right.

If I had to describe the mission of the HPN, the Humanities Podcast Network, what I would say, we have about fifteen members spread across the US and around the
world, and I would say that our mission is to elevate podcasting as a mode of scholarly inquiry and discourse, to promote the freedom and impact of academic affiliated
podcasts, and to provide resources to anybody who's looking to make their podcast or to help their podcast spread scholarly knowledge into wider communities.

Some of the things we do in addition to the symposium, which we'll get to in a little bit, are we meet monthly to talk about ongoing projects.

There is a Paul Grave Handbook of Humanities podcasting that we're publishing maybe in the coming year or next two.

It's going to have sixty chapters, sixty different contributors, all writing about the methods and impact of humanities podcasting.

So that's really exciting to have a textbook on what does it mean to make and evaluate humanities podcasts.

We have a teaching working group that is sometimes invited to go into undergraduate classrooms and provide podcasting workshops and instruction to students who are interested in making their own.

We also have resource guides for people who are looking to either launch their own or help guide students into launching their podcasts.

Neil McPhedran: And there's events.

I mean, next we're going to get into the symposium, but there's seems like there's other events too.

By the way, we're going to put the link to the network in our show notes.

'Cause it's, there's some wonderful resources on there for everyone.

Rebecca Barry: Yeah.

Oh, thank you so much for doing that.

I really appreciate it.

There are occasional events, meetups, forums, discussions.

Going to conferences together.

I would say that the symposium is sort of the flagship, but we're very proud of the total output we've
managed to do in addition to everybody's day jobs as professors, faculty, staff, and other pursuits.

Jennifer-Lee: And you're doing what podcast is supposed to be doing because I think sometimes a lot of people get hung
up on being like, oh, I want to be like Joe Rogan or I want to be like the top podcast, but podcasts are beyond that.

You guys are creating a community that works.

And that's what led you guys to symposium.

So how do you make a symposium for people that don't know and why?

Rebecca Barry: Well, I'll say this.

When I was at UVA and attended my first academic conference, I thought it was so cool that I knew I wanted to run a conference of my own someday.

And this seemed like the perfect opportunity to take part in something that was completely virtual, open to people around the world, and connecting them about a concept I love, which is podcasting.

I would say that we spent between February and November of 2024 preparing the symposium.

We had a team of five people, including myself.

Shout out to Nick Montgomery, Mary Ellen Kubit, Kim Fox, and Dan Dissinger.

We met monthly, but had a lot of correspondence in between because we had to plan everything from the call for podcasts, as opposed to the call for papers, to
the Eventbrite, to the recordings, to selecting from the people who applied, which ones were going to fit on panels together and to everything else in between.

The marketing and communications was a heavy lift.

It was really exciting to work with my team and I think one of the best parts of working together was when we would have Zoom conferences, and I'd be really
stuck on how to solve a particular problem, and somebody had an answer in an instant that solved everything that I was going to spend five hours working on.

So the power of people having different skill sets and different experiences in academia and out was extremely foundational to the success
of this year's symposium, and I'm really proud to say that by November, we managed to get three hundred and thirty-eight people registered.

They were from all around the world.

We had something like thirty-five presenters, and I'm just looking at some of the places they represent because as many universities as we had, we had a couple of podcasting organizations as well.

So it's people from Boston University and the University of Sao Paulo and the University of Glasgow and West Point.

So we're really proud of how many people we managed to reach and how many people said yes to this opportunity to discuss podcasting in a virtual space with people from around the world.

Neil McPhedran: And it was a multi day, right?

So you run this over multiple days and it's all online, correct?

Rebecca Barry: Yeah, this was actually a big step up from the way we ran the 2023 one.

Last year we had just one day and four panels, nothing was concurrent, everything was confined to a single Saturday.

This year we had both Friday and Saturday, and pretty much every single panel was concurrent with another one.

So we had two different Zoom meetings going on at once, two recordings, two hosts.

Um, it was a lot more planning in terms of the number of people that were involved and featured.

But it was incredibly rewarding to see just how many podcasters wanted to get their voices out there.

And while we did have some panels that were individual scholars who wanted to talk about the politics of podcasting or what it means to say, I am a scholar, I am an academic, and I'm a podcaster.

We also had a lot of people who applied as teams.

For instance, there's a really robust University of Central Florida team that have created this podcasting network
between faculty, staff, and students, and they wanted to talk about what it was like launching this new network.

And I'm happy to say that two of those five panel members have since asked to join the HPN as full time committee members, so they must have had a good experience.

Now, there's one piece of the symposium I haven't talked about yet, and that was this year's theme.

Which was best practices.

So back in February, when we were first starting to plan our ideas for the symposium, I came into one of our meetings
and I was ranting a little bit about the fact that I was trying to find out who at my university were the podcasters.

And the faculty podcasts I had listened to would sign off and remind you to come back next week, but they didn't have any credits.

They didn't say who the producer was or their editor or the fact checker or their researcher.

They just gave credit to themselves.

And I found this kind of enraging, if I'm totally honest.

Neil McPhedran: Especially for academia, which is all about citing and giving credit and quoting and like the rigor involved with citing that is just like, that is academia.

Rebecca Barry: Oh, a hundred percent.

And I, it's not that the faculty were doing all of this themselves, because I know who helps record them, I know who helped edit them, but I had to do so much digging to go find that out because it
wasn't evident either from their podcast or from their website, that we were discussing as a group, like, wow, that should really be a pretty basic best practice for academic humanities podcasts.

Give credit to the people whose hand touched this in some way.

And from that, we started having lots of conversations about, maybe it would be a good idea to draw up a
recommended best practices document that we could workshop together, share with the symposium, share with the world.

Now, spoiler alert, that didn't actually happen.

Neil McPhedran: Oh, I was just going to ask about that so we could share that with everyone.

Rebecca Barry: The reason is the more we got into the nitty gritty of what making best practices for podcasting looks like, the more we could not come to a consensus on anything.

Neil McPhedran: Interesting.

Rebecca Barry: Now, I would say, okay, in addition to, you got to give credit to the people who worked on the podcast.

That one was kind of a universal agree.

The next one we mostly agreed on was you really should have a transcript that goes with your podcast these days for accessibility purposes.

The one holdout that we had, or sort of the one question we had about it, is the fact that we want the barrier to entry for making a podcast to still be as
low as possible so that your eighteen year old college student could pick up their phone, record an amazing idea they have, and make a podcast of their own.

We want it to be a free, accessible mode of discourse and a way to record and share your voice.

You know, creating a transcript is either A, not free , or B, kinda time intensive.

And so if you're somebody who recorded a one hour podcast, that could easily be another five or six hours
of labor you're putting in, or a couple dollars that you're putting toward an AI or human made transcript.

And so we found that this was true for pretty much every item we put on the table.

Should there be a best practice that your podcast should have its own website?

There are a lot of pros and a lot of cons.

Jennifer-Lee: That's a huge debate.

Rebecca Barry: Yeah, I guess I see what you mean.

Things like, should we have guidelines around SEO and searchability?

I was trying to look for a podcast made by one of my colleagues at Yale University, a wonderful black woman scholar who used to be the director of writing at a prominent university,
and I type in her name and it keeps giving me somebody who's got a sound alike name, you know, like I'm Rebecca Barry, it kept giving me the equivalent of like Rebecca Barrett.

And I was like, no, I want this person.

And I think the SEO was algorithmically, it was feeding me whoever was most popular.

And the effect was to effectively erase this person who has her own podcast, who has been featured on a five or six other people's podcasts.

Give me what I want.

Don't give me what's already popular and mainstream.

I was so upset that this academic could not be found on this platform.

Jennifer-Lee: I get it.

But that's the biggest thing that I tell people is like, they do a podcast and it's put out there in a silo and they don't put it onto their website and they don't do transcripts for possible SEO.

They don't do other SEO stuff.

They don't make a separate page per episode because they're like, oh, that's a lot of work on our website.

There's a reason for it.

If you're going to do it, do it right.

Neil McPhedran: This is something actually that we're trying to solve with our directory that we're building called Higher Ed Pods.

And next year, we're actually working with a data scientist right now to take all of the metadata of all the podcasts that are in our directory.

So back to what you were just talking about, Rebecca, the show notes, the titling, the who is in it.

If there's transcripts, to take all that data in and be able to search it and to have results come out.

So what the vision is, is like to take this incredible body of academic podcasts and university podcasts and be able to, you know, like that colleague
you just talked about, like in theory, we should be able to search her and not only find her podcast, but you just said like she's been on six podcasts.

We should see those six episodes that she's been on and I think that's what we want.

We all kind of want that, right?

And especially in academia just the importance of citing and being able to find other scholars, being able to search other topics, so on and so forth.

There's so much going on in podcasting to tap into.

Rebecca Barry: Well, let me ask you this.

I mean, do you feel that best practices can be written for podcasts or is it such a naturally free, unregulated medium and platform that you kind of can't write best practices.

So we've got a recently joined member to the HPA named Carl Hartley.

He's a former BBC guy who works at the University of Leeds, and he's conducting a study of podcasters around the world to find out what is their
perception of the idea of regulation and podcasts, which is to say, he wants to know what do we think about the idea of regulation, how we react to it.

And his primary incentive based on the survey, which I, which I took, is that he's very concerned about misinformation and disinformation campaigns being spread or amplified by podcasters.

I think we can all think of a couple of prominent podcasters with humongous platforms that have spread not entirely factual information that was then repeated as truth by other people.

And so I thought that was a really interesting perspective because as much as I want podcasting to be totally accessible to people of all different socioeconomic strata and all different
ages, I also understand the harm that can come from podcasts which have zero regulation and which are allowed to perpetuate ideas which are harmful to others or which are factually incorrect.

Neil McPhedran: Especially with there's this I, I sort of explained to friends who aren't in podcasting how there's this corner of the podcast space
which because it's an RSS feed is this uncancellable thing in theory, the RSS feed, so as a result, it attracts this sort of pocket in podcasting.

But, it's in podcasting is a really unique medium, I think, because of the RSS feed and sort of the history of it.

Rebecca Barry: Well, certainly it begs the question, right?

If we said yes to regulation in order to combat disinformation, what would that look like?

Does every podcast need to have a full time fact checker that they pay for and keep on staff?

Does every podcast need to have a researcher?

Does every podcast need to be peer reviewed?

Does every podcast need to have, uh, approval from a university or a government organization?

Jennifer-Lee: And I think it's just, it's such a deep conversation because I do think eventually, you know, like everything, there will be some type of regulation because as
traditional media morphs more into podcasting with advertising, everything, I feel like there'll be standard best practices, but I also think every podcast is extremely different.

And it's interesting because a lot of people are like, because Neil and I both own companies that we work with clients and we work in the business space and higher education space.

And a lot of them are like, well, what's your pricing?

And it's like, yeah, we have standard packages, but like not every podcast needs every single thing.

And so I think that goes with the best practices.

Not every podcast needs everything, but they need the standard things like transcripts, like SEO.

But other things, maybe they don't need necessarily.

Neil McPhedran: No, I think more and more, especially as I think more apps are starting to adopt more features.

Like in 2024, we've seen Spotify, well almost Spotify, they're almost there, but Apple bringing on transcripts.

Chapters are now something that are being recognized by Spotify and by Apple.

There's a lot of other apps that they've been recognized for a long time.

Um, well, we were just talking about the people, so that's starting to happen where you can see people in a podcast, whether the hosts or the producers or whatnot, so I
think that as the apps become more sophisticated with these feature sets, those are going to become, I think, or should become some of this sort of bare minimum, if you will.

I think you could go all the way, like there's almost like the starter kit.

And then there's that next level of, of should have, I think as well too.

And.

Jennifer-Lee: I think this is also a contentious topic because no one is able to answer and everybody has their own opinion on it, is video podcasts.

Video podcasts.

Do you do video?

And it's always one of those things that it's like, we've talked to even experts in this field.

It's not necessarily the actual video of me on a mic.

You just have to be on YouTube again for the SEO purpose.

So does a podcast with somebody that is well known with a placard and a moving bar that gets tons of views, is that any different from somebody that is sitting here in front of a microphone?

And that's a big issue.

A lot of people debate all the time.

They're like, what's right?

Who's better?

The video podcast or the audio podcaster?

Because YouTube is still on its own when it comes to, yeah, it's inserting different things and now you can get your RSS feed.

But it's still out on its own compared to like all the other ones are on a hosting platform, right?

I will say what I do think you need, because more and more of them are becoming successful, is little short clips of you on video for YouTube shorts.

But because that's quicker and that's going to engage me, but it's like when social media was coming out and they're like, oh, what would be a great idea?

You to take a video and put on social media of you on the microphone.

I said, that's boring.

No one wants to see me in the studio looking at my notes.

Rebecca Barry: You're making me think of a very avant garde solution, compromise.

I like to watch the spectral waveform go by.

Jennifer-Lee: Oh, I do like that.

You're my person, man.

Rebecca Barry: I do have a little bit of difficulty when people speak differentiating between their t, d, p, b.

And when I can see the shape, color, and density of the sound in the waveform spectrometer, it's like I'm reading a new language, or it's like I
have a keynote, or it's like I have a dictionary to this language that I'm finally hearing and understanding and appreciating in all its beauty.

And I think if people could see the degree to which the color and shape and density of your voice can be
mapped and as a unique fingerprint to you, I think some people would find that very artistic and very lovely.

Jennifer-Lee: And I love a good wave for him because I'm also an Adobe editor and I love, like no one mentions Adobe anymore.

I love it.

Rebecca Barry: Oh yeah.

Yeah.

So if, If we're describing this for some people who've never heard it before, breaths come through as this beautiful purple haze and a really strong buh comes across as like a gold burst.

Neil McPhedran: I love it.

That's great.

One more question.

Any tips for anyone out there who's thinking about planning a symposium, virtual conference, something like that.

Obviously it's a lot of work, which I think we've garnered from sort of the way you described the timeline set up, whatever, but sort of any final tips.

'Cause I'm sure there's some folks out there thinking about this.

Rebecca Barry: Yeah.

I don't know if I can phrase this exactly how I want to, but use all of your resources early and often.

If you're going to send your call for papers or call for podcasts out to people you know, send it to all of the people you know.

And then when it comes time to say, hey, great news, we've accepted everybody.

Here's our final slate of when we're going to meet, send it to everybody.

You never know what's going to stick.

And sometimes people who are long out of your life come out of the woodwork and you reconnect over this.

And I think there's also something to be said for planting the seed extremely early and then watching the ball roll.

I would say that we doubled the number of people registered for the symposium in the final week.

And I think it's because the word finally got out at like Amplify and people shared the news at Amplify.

So never give up, even if you're looking at the very end and you're thinking, oh, dear god, you know, it's eleven PM.

and the deadline is midnight.

Come midnight, you will get more responses than you're expecting.

Just wait for the deadline.

You know academics.

They're working to the deadline.

Neil McPhedran: That's great.

Jennifer-Lee: I'm excited about this.

I want Neil and I to apply for your next one.

Rebecca Barry: It'll probably be October or November of 2025.

We'll probably be looking for people to submit things in June, July, and early August.

Jennifer-Lee: We can speak about many topics.

Maybe you and I can do one just about colors of editing.

Neil McPhedran: There we go.

Well, thank you so much, Rebecca.

This was wonderful.

I really enjoyed our conversation.

Rebecca Barry: Thank you.

This is wonderful too.

Thanks for having me.

Jennifer-Lee: Thank you.

This was a great podcast.

Great start to the new year.

So many things to look forward to.

Feeling inspired now about the higher ed conference after listening to how they created the symposium
and the fact that it's been like four years of the symposium and they get a massive turnout every time.

So feeling hashtag inspired.

Neil McPhedran: I love it.

Feeling

Jennifer-Lee: I need to add some young flair here.

Neil McPhedran: I like it.

I like it, Jen.

Yeah, no, I mean, it definitely is.

And it's amazing that it's this online thing and it's been growing year after year.

Also just, it just is amazing we're like in our third year of continuing studies here, Jen, and we've talked to so many different podcasters now.

And then these things like the humanities podcast comes out of nowhere and there's dozens of podcasts in there.

They've got a four year symposium and we'd never even heard of them.

It just shows you how there's so many layers to the higher education podcast space, and then the more we go, the more these
people meet, and I can't wait for the potential to meet a whole bunch of higher ed podcasters in person in Chicago, in July.

Jennifer-Lee: Yeah, me too.

And I know we talk about a lot, but if you think about the last three years, we really don't have any duplicate podcasts.

Like every podcast in every institution we interviewed is so unique.

So like you said, there's so much space for everyone to be involved and there's probably still topics that haven't even been developed yet.

Neil McPhedran: People out there thinking about it to launch their own podcast in 2025.

And they're going to come to Chicago and learn a whole bunch.

Jennifer-Lee: And party with Neil.

You're great at conferences.

Neil McPhedran: I do like a good conference.

Jennifer-Lee: That's how we ended up working together.

Neil McPhedran: That's right, Jen.

Jennifer-Lee: There we go.

On that note, thank you so much for tuning into the Continuing Studies podcast, a podcast for higher education podcasters.

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