Viera Krúpová’s scientific contributions

Media plays a key role in the learning process. Many listeners, viewers, readers, or visitors of online platforms look to the media as a source of new information to expand their knowledge. With a constantly changing lifestyle that keeps accelerating and putting ever higher demands on people to do several things at once, new media are gaining popularity. One of them is a podcast, which reflects the modern person’s need to do more things at once – that is, to gain new knowledge or to be educated in addition to other activities. The ambition of this study is to focus on podcasts in terms of education and on what this form of media offers to its listeners. In more detail, we want to focus on two specific categories of podcasts – official media and official educational institutions. The main goal of this study is to map and point out how the media and official educational institutions, selected by us, use podcasts for education, what forms they prefer, what the frequency of presented materials is and how they process educational content. We will also focus on evaluating whether and in what form podcasts are offered to users.

Radio broadcasting has been bringing its listeners information, opinions, education, entertainment, and art for decades. It is characterized not only by its specifics but also by genres that have evolved and changed over time. The creators of podcasts, a format that is becoming increasingly popular in the world as well as Slovakia, also work with the base of these principles and characteristics. Their authors intuitively or consciously build on the specific values of radio and work with its genres. The extent to which the authors of the modern communication format of podcasts base their work on the original auditory media has so far been little explored and described. Therefore, this study aims to point out the tendencies of podcast creators to shape the content of their sessions and their creation into specific genres in three case studies. The study maps the genres of classical radio broadcasting, indicates how individual genres have changed and adapted to the needs of a current era, and describes the most common podcasting formats. At the same time, it analyses and compares the use of genres in classical audio formats; their intertwining with podcast work defines the differences in radio broadcasting compared to the modern form of podcasts.

The study focuses on the analysis of the use of a new communication channel - podcast - in the public media environment. Specifically, it compares the concept of podcasting in public media in Slovakia (Radio and Television of Slovakia) and public media in the Czech Republic (Czech Television and Czech Radio). In addition, the study analyzes the podcasting strategy of the mentioned media for the future, as well as the perception and perspective of podcasts as such in the coming years. The collection of the necessary data was obtained in the form of semi-structured interviews, in its processing were used mainly methods such as analytical comparison, generalization, induction, and deduction.

The history of the emergence of podcasting around world is widely described in available literary or online sources. The situation in Slovakia differs. There is no relevant data or information regarding the emergence of podcasts, which is why, in preparation of this study, we approached the producers or creators of some of the first podcasts in Slovakia. Through a series of semi-structured interviews, we asked about the circumstances surrounding the emergence of podcasting, their initial strategies, the practical implementation of podcasting, listeners‘ reactions, success evaluation. We compared the information we had obtained with the described history from around the world, we defined the commonalities, the points of concurrence in the rise of podcasting in the world, as well as in Slovakia, while focusing on the exclusively local particularities. In the conclusion, the study addresses the prospects of podcasting expansion in the near future, through collecting the opinions of the respondents.