An AI-Derived Podcast of The Environmental Studies Academic Program Review
Here is an AI-derived conversational podcast based on the Academic Program Review conducted by the Center for Environmental Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.
So, imagine if you could take all the documents and feedback describing an academic unit's wholesale modifications of undergraduate and graduate degree programs from 2017-2023. Then, shove it all through a multi-step generative LLM AI to summarize and filter it for content. Then, you integrate it with a curated collection of academic program review guidelines, existing data on peer programs, and other policies and documents.
Then, since this is a lot of information to read over, you instead turn it into a "conversational modern podcast" created by yet another AI—everyone loves podcasts these days, right? Make it fun. Make it like something that would cause you to sit in the driveway after coming home after work to hear the end of that particular NPR story.
OK. Here it is.
This is based on my collection of written and collected text and graphical output related to the Center for Environmental Studies Academic Program Review as a WAV audio file (34 MB). The AI workflow digested all the data and produced this audio output. I then processed it using Motion; I added graphics from a recent print ad promotion we did for the unit and inserted a voice waveform so the 12:30.4 duration is not just a static image.
Here is the final output.
Source Content
This content was derived from the Academic Program Review Document, external reviewer's comments, and other curriculum-related documents in my Digital Second Brain. In the spring semester of 2025, I will teach a course at VCU on creating an AI-supported digital second brain like the one used to make this example podcast. As I tell my students,
You will not be replaced by an AI, you will be replaced by those who know how to use AI in the modern workplace.
Figures Mentioned In the "Podcast"
The following images are some of the figures in the report that the AI interpreted from the documents and mentioned in the audio file (see the Report File for all figures). It should be noted that the AI models read and interpreted the raw figures from the document without any additional prompting nor by providing raw data tables.
