Podcast Perspektiven (PPW)

Vorteile, Nachteile

Jeffrey Selingo: Is iTunes-U for You?

What is not yet clear is whether Apple will end up transforming online education as it did the music industry, with the introduction of iTunes in 2001. Right now, iTunes U is something of a novelty. The subject matter and quality of courses offered vary widely. Only a few classes are like Lewin's, where the instructor even seems conscious of the fact that some people might be following the lecture on a tiny iPod screen. The video content from some classes is nothing more than a static slide that shows the name of the course while the professor drones on.

Leslie Madsen Brooks: iTunes U: Disruptive education--in more ways than one

I would like to see universities use iTunes to its fullest potential, making available resources in a variety of formats to meet the needs of all learners—by which I mean students with different learning styles (visual, aural, etc.) and students with learning or physical disabilities. That said, Groom is correct—iTunes U currently doesn't offer sufficient capabilities for people to collaborate; for students to interact with one another; for learners to remix the materials into discussions, presentations, and other media as is done in the best collegiate learning environments; or for institutions to establish sufficient context for their materials.

I myself prefer the "small pieces loosely joined" approach to online learning rather than the packaged learning experiences that come in the guise of course management systems and, in some ways, iTunes U. That said, content fed to me through iTunes—podcasts, primarily—does constitute a significant portion of my personal learning environment.

Ibooks 2 and Itunes U: Excellent new Tools, but not the Cure-All for Education

Here’s the thing, though. You can’t just put together a tool like this and accept it to change the face of education by itself. iBooks 2 and iTunes U are great tools, but utilizing them will require a real effort on the part of educators, because curriculum matters.

Because if the curriculum isn’t designed to utilize the technology to the fullest, then all these great things become nothing more than expensive bells and whistles adorning an otherwise stale learning experience. You can’t just swap out a paper textbook for an iPad and expect the student to know what to do. He or she will just read the new textbook the same way they did the old. Or he won’t read the new textbook the same way he didn’t read the old, more likely!

Brian Kelley: What Are UK Universities Doing With iTunesU?

Two years later how has iTunesU developed across UK higher educational institutions? Are the Open University and UCL feeling slightly embarrassed, like the institutions which decided in 2003 that the future lay with Gopher, or feeling pleased that their institutional commitment had identified an important technology, as was the case when Leeds University set up its institutional Web service in January 1993? There is much that can be learnt from the experiences of early adopters.

Vorteile

Jeremy Speller: iTunes U: an Institutional Perspective

But the real assets should be educational and examples of your institution’s scholarship. How you choose to do this and what material you provide is down to you.

all new sites since mid-2008, including all UK institutions, are split-hosted. This means that even if Apple pull the plug tomorrow all of your feeds and content remain yours and intact, and deliverable via whatever other channels you have in place.

Underwhelmed by iTunes U

David F. Ullman and Blake Haggerty: Embracing the Cloud: Six Ways to Look at the Shift to Cloud Computing

Shel Waggener: E-Content: Opportunity and Risk

iTunes U. Critiques – it’s not as simple as that

Web2 vs iTunesU

Repositories and the Open Web: report

Academic Business Communications?

MOOCs are really a platform

Hold your applause for Stanford’s iTunes project

Nachteile

Jim Groom: 5 Reasons I don’t like ITunesU

Don’t trust anything without a URL! ITunesU has no URLs, isn’t that suspect? Matt Gold

What does it say that most of our content delivery systems are framed according to a logic that is being used for selling goods?

Why aren’t we uploading this stuff to the Internet Archive?

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