There is someone in your family whose stories you've been meaning to get down. This course is about doing it: sitting down with an old person and a recorder, asking, listening, and coming away with something that can still be played when the youngest child in the family is old.
It takes less equipment than you'd think. It takes more thought than pressing a button, because the person who asks is part of what gets told, and because a recording nobody can find hasn't been kept.
The eight lectures take that thought a piece at a time, in the order that makes it easiest to follow, which isn't the order you'd do things in. What an oral history is, and what an old memory holds. Who is asking, how to ask, and what to do when the story is hard. What you can honestly promise the person you record. Then the recording, and how to make it last. At the very end I'll put it back in the order of doing.
Where there's a study or a case behind a piece of advice, you'll hear it, including the times the professionals got it wrong. Where there's only experience, or disagreement, or nobody knows, I'll say that too.