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iTunes University

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Apple has launched a service called iTunes U that provides free hosting for universities who want to make lectures and other audio or video content available to the public. Stanford, of course, has already been there with their Stanford on iTunes for quite awhile [1]. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, there were six universites who tested the service: Stanford, Brown, Duke, University of Michigan School of Dentistry, University of Missouri School of Journalism, and University of Wisconsin at Madison. The service can either be made freely available to the public, or the school can opt to require authentication and thus restrict it to students.

Outside of iTunes, other schools are exploring similar methods of making lectures available to the public:

  • UC-Berkeley is delivering podcasts and webcasts of several of their courses. They have a wide variety of different classes, from the rather obvious choice "Foundations of American Cyberculture" to less-obvious choices like "Animal Behaviour" and "Introductory Physics".
  • Purdue has what they call BoilerCasts, some of which require authentication. Their list is less accessible than the Berkeley one, only listing course numbers (MCMP422?). Someone who's really interested could dig through their current course catalogue to map course numbers to titles.
  • MIT has [what I think is] the longest-standing method for delivering online content through their OpenCourseWare. They've got quite a lot of material on their site, but then they've been doing it since 2001.

There's others (MIT links to other universities using OCW, for example), but these seem to be the major players.

I don't think that this is going to replace a traditional degree. I see it as a way for universities to give back to their communities (and the world community) by offering up small pieces of education to people who are interested. I might subscribe to that Foundations of American Cyberculture podcast to see what they're covering there.

[1] And if you haven't looked there yet, there's a couple of interesting things on iTunes@Stanford. Look under Heard on Campus > Visiting Lecturers and Speeches for Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement speech, as well as more than eight hours of content from the Dalai Lama's appearance there late last year.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 26, 2006
    Yah I like that. I try to promote the idea here. Wish all research seminars could be online to study in detail. It will happen, the future is exponential.