Distance students can suffer from feelings of isolation, which can result in dropouts from lack of motivation to continue the course. Previous studies have shown that the use of podcasts can help reduce this feeling of isolation. Podcasts can also help make studies more flexible, which can aid students with a busy schedule. To evaluate podcasts in distance higher education, we provided the students with four types of podcasts: LectureCasts, TutorialCasts, ReviewCasts and ExtraCasts. We produced 54 podcasts during the course. The students perceived all of the types of podcasts helpful, but preferred the TutorialCasts. These focused on solving actual problems, and the students said that they learned a lot by these. We found that it takes a lot of resources to produce good podcasts and any attempt to introduce them should be budgeted accordingly. We also found that there are still several technical challenges to overcome, from local infrastructure to subscriptions models and device compatibility.