Hey Jonathan,
Two ways to update the podcast.
1. After adding a media file to a podcast, go to the podcast tab, edit the podcast, then click on Write XML
2. Install the podcast plugin from this site which will publish your podcast every x hours that you specify.
As far as a custom episode title, it works just like the custom from anywhere else in the component - using the /helpers/custom.php. You can use anything including fields in brackets like {studydate} in combination with html or just text. In theory that should work the same. So you should be able to do the title and date like you wanted. Try it out!
tom