Lectures in Your Pocket: iTunes Goes to College
Posted January 25th, 2006 by Jon Shannon, South Carolina Governor's School for Science and Mathematics
1 Comments | 2667 Page Views
The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that Apple Computer is releasing iTunes U (http://www.apple.com/education/solutions/itunes_u/), a service that allows colleges and universities to record, upload, and store course lectures in Apple's popular iTunes Music Store. The Chronicle article is available to non-subscribers and reports that colleges can customize their iTunes U site with school colors and logos. Stored lectures can be made public or restricted to certain groups. Access to lectures can be controlled using existing college user ID's and passwords.
A number of schools (Brown, Duke, and Stanford Universities; the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, at Ann Arbor; the University of Missouri School of Journalism, at Columbia; and the University of Wisconsin at Madison) have been testing the service and report success delivering course content to the wildly popular iPod device. Lectures stored in the Apple U iTunes Music Store can only be played on iPods.
Schools that want to participate must sign a service agreement.
With lectures available online, some professors worry that students will have even less motivation to get up for their 8:00am Monday class.
A number of schools (Brown, Duke, and Stanford Universities; the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, at Ann Arbor; the University of Missouri School of Journalism, at Columbia; and the University of Wisconsin at Madison) have been testing the service and report success delivering course content to the wildly popular iPod device. Lectures stored in the Apple U iTunes Music Store can only be played on iPods.
Schools that want to participate must sign a service agreement.
With lectures available online, some professors worry that students will have even less motivation to get up for their 8:00am Monday class.
How to cite this work
Jon Shannon. "Lectures in Your Pocket: iTunes Goes to College." Academic Commons Issue Name (Spring 2008): 12 October 2008. <http://www.academiccommons.org/>.Bookmark/Search this post with:
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TechnoratiRe: Lectures in Your Pocket: iTunes Goes to College
On February 20th, 2006 John Ottenhoff, Associated Colleges of the Midwest said:
The Scout Report (http://scout.wisc.edu/) the excellent weekly digest from Wisconsin, also had a recent blurb about Stanford making lectures and other material available on iTunes (http://www.academiccommons.org/weblink/goto/71), not quite podcasts but free in the Music Store. The Report writes: "For those who can't make it to the balmy climes of Palo Alto, this latest initiative from Stanford will be most welcome. With this program, visitors can download audio recordings of lectures, poetry readings, and even Stanford football games directly to their computer. Of course, this is no substitute to attending this fine institution, but the wide range of audio content available at no charge is very impressive."
Impressive, maybe, but I'm still wondering where this movement is going. Is it likely that lots of folks out there in the world are going to download some of these 34 lectures (some of them running 2 hours) onto their iPods? Do we see this as an important new means of disseminating information or promoting teaching and learning? Maybe I'm just not a big fan of lectures--or that I just haven't caught the iPod bug.
