Old fun: Music on an iPod | Newer fun: Watching porn on the iPod | Newest fun: Listening to lectures!
Apple Inc is letting NJIT Professors post their lectures, and other audio and video class information on its iTunes U website - where students can go and then download whatever material they want onto their computers, i-pods, mp3 players and even their cell phones.
NJIT Instructional Design Professor Blake Haggerty says if you know you'll be able to download a lecture, "you have the opportunity of really paying attention in class, and then reviewing afterwards what was said."
Ohh.. and don't forget the final quote from a student!
'this is totally an excuse to blow off class and listen to it online."
He's quick to add "but that's a bad idea...you don't get the same learning experience."
I don't think I'd do either If I had the choice... ;)
And just think you can use your iTunes music card to buy lectures instead of Nelly and dance around in a bikini!
- Log in to post comments
I largely approve of the notion of making lecture recordings available. Sure, it'll make people with bad habits skip even more lectures; but having lectures available for review seems like a good thing. Books are great, in part, because they can be referred to whenever necessary. Recorded lectures would have the same advantage. I have significant issues with the means used in this case, though.
With the lectures on iTunes U a student's access becomes dependent on a single, proprietary, software producer. Do you not run Windows or OSX? No access for you. Do you not agree with the iTunes EULA? No access for you? Does Apple change the terms under which iTunes or iTunes U are made available? Nothing you can do about it.
This would be defensible, if regrettable, if iTunes U were the only software for the job. Nobody complains too much about things like Matlab, Mathematica, and Photoshop; because, while proprietary and expensive, they are pretty much the only tools for some jobs. Distributing media files over the internet, though, is an easy and solved problem. Even if you must restrict access to within the university population it still isn't difficult at all. Using unnecessarily restrictive software to do the job seems deleterious to the objective of allowing access.
Depends on the university approach to using it. At NJIT, we are not embracing the record-the-entire-class-live approach (like Purdue & other schools) and posting them after a class.
The majority of our faculty using iTunes U are recording programs that are under 30 minutes and are often designed to be listened to BEFORE a class. I don't know that you could even call most of them "lectures" in the traditional sense.
Most files are mp3 so they can be played on a wide variety of systems and devices. If you need iTunes to view an enhanced podcast in m4a format (audio w/ synchronized images) then you will need iTunes. I'd consider that to be the same thing as needing Acrobat Reader or Flash Player.
Thanks for clearing that up Ken!