'iTunes university' better than the real thing

Students have been handed another excuse to skip class from an unusual quarter. New psychological research suggests that university students who download a podcast lecture achieve substantially higher exam results than those who attend the lecture in person.

offer students the chance to replay difficult parts of a lecture and therefore take better notes, says Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who led the study.

"It isn't so much that you have a podcast, it's what you do with it," she says.

Though her team's paper is subtitled "Can podcasts replace Professors," McKinney thinks these technologies can buttress traditional lectures, particularly for a generation that has grown up with the Internet.

researcher at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, says podcast lectures are good for lecturers too. They free him up to spend precious class time interacting with his students

brief quizzes

each class.