Maybe Apple’s global domination strategy is a good thing? August 18
Wow. iTunes now has a category for educational content. iTunesU aggregates audio files of lectures and stuff from various universities and other providers. Sounds like most of it is free. There’s a promo-video here. I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, but it seems to have potential.
kim Aug 20
Yeah well, you’d be surprised how inconsistent academics are with their podcasting. I have gotten all excited about taking course at Harvard via this format only to be dunped after one download.
M-H Aug 22
Some academics at my institution are really excited about this. But as the uni has just invested quite a lot of money in a trial of inhouse storage of audio and video files and streaming of them to students, I don’t think we’ll be supporting iTunesU.
A lot of these discussions in online Learning boil down to this question: Shall we create and store our material ourselves, or shall we hand over that task to a faceless corporate like apple or google? The latter might seem like a cheaper solution, but there may be more risks in quality control, future accesss etc. Academics sometimes seem very naive about these issues. I have had people say things to me like: “The uni would have to build another building to store all this stuff. Let Apple/Google do it for free.” First, the uni doesn’t have it on the campus any more; the servers can be in a warehouse anywhere, and digital storage space is now very cheap and easily rented. Hiring it means that you control security (ie access and backups). Second, corporates never do anything for ‘free’. Remember the eighties? “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” suddenly turned into “There’s no lunch” for a lot of people.