Podcast Perspektiven (PPW)

Report

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.

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

At NJIT, in looking at the no-fee SaaS services then available from Google and Microsoft (the no-fee Zimbra service was not then available), the real issue became one of cost avoidance in trying to provide comparable services to students and alumni (for example, disk quotas of 6 gigabytes versus 55 megabytes for the legacy service, a cleaner interface, an increased feature set, and greater spam filtering). Outsourcing student e-mail to Google or Microsoft would save about $32,000 annually of direct operational costs, exclusive of staff support. The costs to provide a comparable on-premises service started with a nearly $200,000 capital investment for hardware, plus estimated operational costs of about $60,000 annually. From the CIO's perspective, this was an easy decision.

Continued questions on the long-term roadmap for Campus Edition and an unpredictable long-term licensing model with Blackboard became obstacles to maintaining the Blackboard product as the single recommended standard for e-learning at NJIT. Alternatively, grass-roots feedback among faculty on positive experiences with Moodle fueled its growth on campus. In fall 2009, based on continued satisfaction with Moodle, a stable hosting partner, and predictable hosting fees, we chose Moodle as the successor e-learning platform to Blackboard's Campus Edition. The spring 2010 semester marked the end of Campus Edition use and the offering of 435 Moodle course sections. Moodle adoption had surpassed the highest level of WebCT adoption by 40 percent (see Figure 2).

Aside from providing a no-fee digital asset repository with access control to individual classes, iTunes U provides the opportunity to showcase the scholarly work of faculty and students worldwide. On October 20, 2008, four professors from NJIT's School of Management held a university-wide forum titled "Wall Street Meltdown: What Happened? What to Expect?" The forum consisted of four separate lectures on different aspects of the financial crisis, followed by a question and answer session with the panelists and audience members (see Figure 3). The iTunes U podcast of the series received over 45,000 downloads. Subsequent podcasts on "Mortgage Markets" and "Lehman Brothers: One Year Later" received nearly 17,000 and 15,000 downloads respectively. Video created for iTunes U is reusable, and we feature it from multiple sites (such as http://www.njit.edu and http://www.njit.tv).

Shel Waggener: E-Content: Opportunity and Risk

As is the case with most innovations, we won't understand the real impact until people are actively exploring e-content. Even though most students are already using e-content and many faculty have received proposals from publishers to distribute their content electronically, higher education leaders should not be dissuaded. Campuses should embrace these changes, involve their communities, and move forward. Rather than waiting for things to settle in the market before making a decision, institutional leaders should get involved immediately by trying some pilots, funding a small grant for faculty content development, and examining what other institutions are doing in the areas of e-content. The sooner a campus establishes a process for supporting its community's exploration of different models of e-content, the sooner it will be able to help positively influence the e-content marketplace and also address the largest priorities of higher education today: learning in new, effective ways while simultaneously lowering the cost of education.

Web2 vs iTunesU

Andy Powell, however pointed out that it was so “Googleable” that a video from Warwick University on iTunesU video came higher in the search results for University of Warwick No Paradise without Banks than the same video on Warwick’s own site. (The first result I get is from Warwick, about the event, but doesn’t seem to give access to the video–at least not so easily that I can find it; the second result I get is the copy from iTunes U, on deimos.apple.com . Incidentally, I get nothing for the same search term on Google Videos.) He pointed out that this is “(implicitly) encouraging use of the iTunes U version (and therefore use of iTunes) rather than the lighter-weight ‘web’ version.”

Repositories and the Open Web: report

A theme that didn’t quite get discussed, but is nonetheless interesting was around openness. Joss Winn made a very valid distinction between the open web and the social web, one which I had blurred in the build up to the event. So facebook is part of the social web but is by no means open. There was some discussion about whether openness is important in achieving the goals of, e.g., disseminating learning resources. For example, iTunesU is used successfully by many to disseminate pod- and videocasts of lectures, and arguably the vertical integration offered by Apple’s ownership/control of all the levels leads to a better user experience than is the case for some of the alternatives.

Academic Business Communications?

My gut feeling from skimming this feed is that the OU has been appointing IT related jobs like crazy over the last year or so (read in to that what you may; high churn maybe? Or major IT restructuring?) and relatively few academic positions (from which we might conclude as observers either that the OU has a young/middle aged academic workforce, or that managing the size of the academic body through natural wastage is the order of the day). I think Google Reader will have been archiving the feed, so I guess I could try to run some sort of analysis over it. But that’s as maybe ...

MOOCs are really a platform

We can officially declare massive open online courses (MOOCs) as the higher education buzzword for 2012. Between Coursera, edX and smaller open course offerings, nearly $100 million in funding has been directed toward MOOCs in that past 8 months. Newspapers from NYTimes to Globe and Mail to publications such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, TV programs such as NPR, radio programs such as CBC, and a few hundred thousand blog posts have contributed to the hype.

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!

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.

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

From what I see, and I have no insider info (so I could of course be wrong), all the iTunes U. service offers is an option for publishing media easily, into the most popular (legal) online content distribution system on the planet.

Nachteile

Hold your applause for Stanford’s iTunes project

From Apple’s perspective it makes sense. It’s just business, securing marketshare and all that. And Stanford is thinking in terms of enhancing its brand, which it has every right to do. And some valuable content is easier for many (but not all) of us to get at than it was a year ago. But I wish they weren’t wrapped in an impenetrable cloak of virtue. And it’s dangerous that this practice is uncritically perceived as what we should all be working to emulate.

Gardner Campbell: "iTunes U": Apple's free path to vendor lock-in

Obviously it is not enough for Apple to win market share based on mere excellence. Their larger strategy, perversely admirable in its cleverness, is to leverage popular culture from within the institution (all those iPods we have–and “we” means me, too, for it is truly an excellent product) to lure institutions into a) helping them generate a monopoly and b) giving in to their own worst impulses with regard to locking away the knowledge and expertise they generate.

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?

Jim Groom: Underwhelmed by iTunes U

Can I just say how unimpressed I was with the demonstration of iTunes U we had yesterday. In short, iTunes U offers universities a free, mildly customizable space on the iTunes client that allows students and faculty to upload and access digital content such as podcasts, vodcasts, etc. The organizing logic is that iTunes U does the aggregation for the university and offers a half terrabyte of storage space. But are either of these elements necessarily unique given the tools we already have at our disposal? I mean what can iTunes U do that a WordPress install with PodPress and a few aggregation plugins cannot? Hey, Drupal might even be able to handle this one without too much fuss. And guess what, unlike iTunes, these applications are web-based and provide easily accessible RSS feeds.

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