Dr. Coley is an Associate Professor at Birmingham City University, where he is Course Director for the MA Media Production. He is a member of the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research and investigates radio and podcast production, the music documentary, aural pedagogies, media education, and practice-based research methodology. As a producer, his music documentaries have been broadcast on networks such as the BBC, Absolute Radio, Greatest Hits Radio and Radio New Zealand. Dr Coley has led multiple British Council-funded audio training collaborations with partner universities in India. He has been a Grand Jury member of the New York Radio Festival since 2012 and is a Trustee of the Charles Parker Archive Trust.
His keynote, Sound Knowledge: Music Podcasts as ‘Edutainment’, traces the lineage from the radio music documentary to the contemporary music podcast and asks what media educators can learn from it. Drawing on his own work as a freelance producer and research into music podcasts as ‘aural pedagogies’, Coley argues that education and entertainment were never in opposition, and that some of the most effective teaching happening today is being done by podcast producers who would never describe their work as ‘pedagogy’.