Abandoning Cassette Tapes, Purdue U. Will Podcast Lectures in Almost 50 Courses

By BROCK READ

For years, students at Purdue University at West Lafayette who missed an important class headed off to the campus library, where up-to-date cassette recordings from more than 90 courses sat waiting to be checked out.

But this fall some students can skip the library. The university is making many of its course recordings available as podcasts -- MP3 files that students can download automatically to their digital-audio players.

Purdue's BoilerCast Web site -- which