I recently attended an Apple Roadshow that was focussed on the introduction of iTunes U in Australia. I was interested in what they’d tell us about the ‘program’ and also to see what they could provide as support for ‘workflow’ (getting podcasts uploaded).
While a little cynical about our institution having to be locked to delivering podcasts through iTunes, I was pleasantly surprised to note that this wasn’t necessarily the case. We could link to a podcast (kept in iTunes U) directly from a unit section in our LMS. So, each object has the ability to be accessed via an individual url rather then through the iTunes feed.
The other thing they told us about was the ability of iTunes U to provide access to both public and private podcasts. This means that we would be able to tag some of our material as public and freely available (say more for marketing and communication purposes), while other material could be tagged as private and only available for registered or authenticated users.
They also have a nice feature in the iTunes U server software/application called Podcast Producer that tops and tails, and watermarks each podcast to provide a uni/faculty ‘livery’ to each object. This would save a lot of time in getting podcasts delivered to production, and at least give some consistent ‘look’ to what was made available.
I suppsoe iTunes U is a lot like Lectopia (the system we currently use to record lectures live) in regard to processing the recordings, but it doesn’t do the actual lecture theatre recordings – it’s more suited for individual desktop work. I did come away with a different view on what Apple were providing and can see there could be benefits for those involved in the program.
As our institution hasn’t yet signed up for this service, it would be useful for us to at least encourage our leadership to enagage in talks and examine the usefulness of such a service for our university, both for teaching and learning, and for marketing.