Tuesday, 10 July 2007

iTunes U - proprietory or open?

I've just been to a talk about podcasting by someone from the Higher Education branch of Apple Europe, arranged by the Maths & Computing Faculty.

One of the big questions the talk answered for many Open University staff is who has control of the content? It turns out that iTunes U, as used in the US, is not a hosting service, it’s a subscription model, i.e. it provides the RSS feed for your podcasts and acts as an advert for your university. This means that universities host their own content, and retain control of it – iTunes just provides a way for people to find and access it.

Institutions publishing their content through iTunes U have a choice to have both public content and walled garden, authenticated content.
As a case study, Berkeley university in Canada were one of the first to adopt iTunes U and the speaker estimated that Berkeley content is 60/40 or 70/30 public/private. He didn't have actual figures. Their public content has been enormously popular - they have 3.5 million users worldwide, even though they only have about 22,000 students.

Lyon 2 in France are using text-to-speech software to podcast journals and other archive content which they are in the process of digitising.

So, should the OU be podcasting? Well, yes, but only where it's appropriate. We've been making audio content for years, this is just a different way of delivering it. 'Quick and dirty' podcasts can be used to update students about news that's relevant to their subject, or to bring them the voices of practitioners in their field. Or more polished podcasts could be used to deliver the kind of audio content we already provide at the right time in the course.

Of course, now what we need is a clear, coherent solution which makes it easy to create, store and publish podcasts, and there are a number of teams across the university working towards this goal.

Posted by Keren Mills at 17:05

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous11 July 2007 at 11:59

    I'm not sure iTunesU is the best available solution for the OU. The main problem is that iTunes is not available on Linux, shutting the increasing numbers of Linux users out of any OU solution based on iTunesU. Many people may think that this does not matter, but if the OU is meant to be "open to all" then surely this is a bit of a problem. Another problem is that iTunes & iTunesU are products of a commercial company and we would be at the mercy of that company’s business decisions. We don't have to use a proprietary product for podcasting. A very interesting alternative is the Democracy Player, it is a fully open source platform (providing client and server side software) for audio and video podcasting. The server side also makes iTunes compatible feeds. I notice that Warwick University have already put a channel up about their research.

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  2. Anonymous11 July 2007 at 15:14

    Perhaps it differs outside the U.S., but Apple DOES host all our podcasts on its servers for iTunes U. They provide the iTunes search etc. and we handle the authentication for private (course) materials.

    at New Jersey Institute of Technology
    http://itunes.njit.edu

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  3. Keren Mills11 July 2007 at 16:13

    Thanks, Ken. That's interesting to know. The Apple representative who spoke to us yesterday said they had done that in the early days, but realised that there were problems with that model of working because most institutions prefer to retain control of their content.

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  4. Anonymous8 March 2009 at 00:52

    In Linux you should be able to access it with this:
    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/iTunesMusicStore

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  5. Anonymous13 April 2009 at 03:28

    Thanks Anonymous. That's just what I need.

    ReplyDelete

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