iTunes U - University of Minnesota
by Pablo Viedma
“When you see students walking on campus with headphones plugged in their ears, they may be studying for finals as well as listening to their favorite tunes.” —MIT website
The University of Minnesota has partnered with Apple to offer iTunes U, a tailored version of iTunes, which can be used to manage, distribute and control access to educational audio and video content for students within the University or broader community. With iTunes U, access to educational materials can be either public or restricted to a certain class.
U of M iTunes U provides access to a wide range of University of Minnesota-related digital audio and video content via the iTunes Store, Apple’s popular online music, video, and podcast service. iTunes makes it fun and easy to organize and play your favorite music and movies. Now you can add educational recordings from your lectures to your iTunes library. From there, you will be able to create custom playlists, sync to your iPod, burn CDs, etc.
So what can you do with iTunes U? Well, as a contributor, you can upload:
- News and updates
- Student presentations
- Interviews
- Video or audio notes for students enrolled in your courses
- Short language lessons that help students develop listening and speaking skills
- PDFs
...and much more…
One of the best things about iTunes U is the portability of content. Your audience can view or listen to your contributions while on the go using their favorite media player.
iTunes U Website
The main website for the U of M iTunes U is: itunes.umn.edu/
On this page, you can log in to both the public and the access-restricted iTunes U and view an orientation, request a course podcast, and get more information on how to submit content.
On your course podcast, you can have different tabs for audio, video, or even custom ones that could link to a previously created podcast (UThink, Blogger, etc). Editing the page is simple.
The interface to upload files is web-based and quite intuitive. The only feature that we would wish for is a folder upload.
Example of Good Practice
French instructor Rick Treece is using iTunesU with both sections of Fren 3014 (French Phonetics). The textbook has hundreds of exercises with audio that were originally on cassettes and still for sale from the publisher! Several years ago he digitized them onto eleven CDs which the Language Center has been duplicating with the publisher’s consent and distributing to the students. (For which they are been paying an $11 course fee). Assuming all goes well with the switch to iTunes, he will be able to eliminate this course fee for the students.
He will also be publishing music videos (captured off of satellite TV) and some videos of poems (La Fontaine fables, etc. from a VHS tape) that they use in class and for transcription practice in the workbook he wrote to go with the text, plus a couple of audio recordings of poems (from CDs). Rick will also be able to include videos to accompany extra practice activities that he put in an appendix in the workbook.