iTunes U

After a bumpy start, (my PC deciding it wanted to enjoy a long weekend and giving up the goat) this morning turned out to be a rather informative and constructive one…

I attended a meeting fronted by Paul McFadden (head of sales for Apple iTunes in Europe) to discuss a new piece of technology called iTunes U. And what is iTunes U I hear you ask? Well, iTunes U is just like iTunes but for educational content – so lecturers within the university could create podcasts/videocasts relating to their courses and make them available in a LJMU branded iTunes store. Students can then subscribe to the content that is produced for their modules. Subscriptions to playlists can either be password protected (which is synced to the universities username and password facility) or public facing; the advantage of allowing external access (ie access from non-students) is that the profile of the university is raised each time an external person accesses or downloads content that is produced within the institution. A prime example of this being Joseph Stiglitz’s podcast about the credit crunch at The University of Oxford which now occupies the number one spot in the global iTunes U top download chart thanks to its popularity – now I know The University of Oxford does’t need their profile raising any further but the idea and indication of what a successful podcast could do for an institution is there all the same!!

All the content that is produced for the store is held on campus by the university (Apple do not have a hold on any content) and there isn’t a cost to the students for accessing the material. The costing to the university comes through staffing and the time spent to produce the content in the first place but apart from that it’s plain sailing.

A prime example of an iTunes U store that’s an extremely high standard is that of the OU –check it out – it is very slick!!

So what’s for the future here at LJMU? Well as of yet I’m not sure but hopefully iTunes U will be embraced by the university enabling us to provide podcasts/videocasts to students in an easy to use and scalable way.