February 2008 Archives

Glad to report that we have made progress on migrating our UA on iTunes U public pages to the new interface. This is the interface that institutions coming up live on iTunes U are using and that iTunes U flagship institutions like Duke and Stanford implemented months ago. There have been some issues getting the authentication and editing privleges in place. Casey Boettcher, the LTS' computer programmer working on the tech side of our iTunes U, has been grappling with these.

Over the coming week, Casey Ontivares and I will be uploading tracks to the sections in the new interface. Unfortunately, we have to do each of these one-by-one since there is no way to move content from the current UA iTunes U site to the new one. We would like to have this site in-place over spring break. You should be able to follow this link to get a look at the new interface. Of course, you'll need iTunes installed to get there.

We've made good progress on adding content to the UA's YouTube channel. One reason is that the UA's External Relations is sending over videos produced by UA News' of Award Winning Professors who have been named Regents' Professors and University Distinguished Professors. We're adding the "Edges of Life" lectures to the College of Science Lecture Series playlist and have begun a playlist for Peace Corps Fellows/USA at The UA. As soons as we get the videos from the undergraduate research forum ready, we'll start a new playlist those.

I also started a small website for the UA's YouTube channel that includes an FAQ and a page with links to other universities' YouTube channels. Check these out -- maybe you'll get ideas about how your department, program, or college might participate. Click the link at the beginning of this paragraph or the image atop this entry to visit it.

One thing that bears mention is that uploading videos to our UA YouTube channel has been more problemmatic than anticipated. While YouTube accepts a number of formats, it has not accepted MPEG-4 videos encoded for iTunes U, using the H.264 codec. And it's not processed other MPEG-4 videos that we thought it ought to accept. Heather has been researching this and trying out different approaches. The bottomline is that it has added to the workload, since media services has to encode the videos at least twice for a number of videos - once for iTunes U and once for YouTube.

Attached is a spreadsheet containing a report of the activity on arizona.edu's iTunes U site for the past four weeks. Please note that there are multiple worksheets that contain information about different weeks. The main worksheet, Summary, contains a week-by-week overview of our site activity.

Tony Gallego and I were at the 21st Annual Undergraduate Research Forum this morning. Tony captured video of about a dozen of the students reviewing their research project and we'll be adding it to the UA's YouTube channel in a couple weeks.

Listening to these incredibly bright young people explain their research findings was a treat. Plus, featuring the videos on our YouTube channel gives this exceptional UA program exposure among high school students and undergraduates. After all, how many universities give undergraduates the opportunity to spend a year conducting research alongside scientists, post docs, and senior faculty. Darn few!

UA News wrote about the event on Feb. 1st, "Research Forum Acknowledges Undergraduate Scholarship."

For those of you tracking downloads of your content, here is the most recent iTunes U Usage Report from Apple Inc.

Back in October, I bought an iPod Touch. If you're not familiar with it, follow the link. I like to describe it as an iPhone without the cell phone. One of the widgets that comes on the Touch is YouTube. So long as you are online via a wireless connection, you can search YouTube and play its videos. What I've noticed is how incredibly sharp the video quality is. More on that in this YouTube video.

I've updated the Blogging @ the LTS website to reflect Spring Semesters instructional blogging. Visit this page for a snapshot.

Here's a quick update on a couple prospective campus players in the UA's YouTube channel.

I was meeting with Georgia Ehlers in the Graduate College. Georgia is listed as the coordinator of Office of Fellowships, Internships and Community Engagement. She is the UA person who works with the Peace Corps Fellows/USA at The University of Arizona.

She is looking for a good way to communicate and involve 60 fellows and is trying a blog. We were meeting about the blog and talked about the UA's YouTube channel. Georgia immediately saw its potential to promote the program. In fact, within a couple hours, she had outlined what content we could look for in videos of our UA fellows. Sounds great, don't you think? Heather Lares and our LTS media services group will shoot the video (probably do a little producing on the spot) and edit the video for YouTube, and possibly for iTunes U.

From our afternoon UITS meeting in Gallagher Theater, I went to BIO5 to meet with Daphne Gilman, Events Coordinator, Senior, BIO5 Marketing & Communications. BIO5 has a strong outreach mission and Daphne sees the UA's YouTube channel and iTunes U as excellent ways to reach out to the public. Check out BIO5's website to understand what this impressive collaboration among UA scientists is accomplishing.

It appears that Apple had some troubles getting this one out. It arrived twice today, Tuesday, and one of the spreadsheets had no data in it. The second appears to be up-to-date. Over 10,000 users visited the site and we saw double-digit downloads for many different tracks. There were 20 for the Michael Hammer's April 18, 2006, "Human Evolution: Tracing Our Origins with DNA" COS Evolution series lecture. Download the spreadsheet for more details and to see the number of downloads for any of your tracks.

For those of you who are supporting podcasting, check out today's Woot for a ganga deal on Sandisk digital recorders. You can get up to three 1GB Sandisks for only $9.99 each plus $5.00 shipping. We've been using these for a few years and I have pretty good instructions, if you're interested. Just drop me an email and I'll attach the instructions to an email. IMPORTANT! Woot is one-day only. So you need to do this today, Monday, Feb. 11, 2008.

Over the past week I added more videos to the UA’s YouTube channel. http://youtube.com/arizona. It’s taking shape nicely. When you visit the homepage, you’ll see a window showing a selection of the 32 videos we now have up. The most recent are perfect for our YouTube channel and came over from External Relations’ Enrollment Management office. Enrollment Management created a number of short videos featuring undergraduates and alumni. See what you think.

In addition, I started to upload the College of Science’s past lecture series Evolution and Global Climate Change. These have been quite popular, as you know. They’ve been presented to a packed house, like the current Edges of Life series, and have been available as podcasts since first given. Interestingly, one of the four Evolution lectures and all seven of the Global Climate Change lectures failed to upload successfully to YouTube. YouTube has some great technology behind handing the many different video formats it accepts and convents to Flash movies. Heather thinks they might have been encoded for MP4 in a way other than how the other MP4 movies I’ve uploaded successfully and is going to re-encode them according to our most recent standards.

Download use stats for Jan. 27th - Feb. 2nd

I can see that we're getting more visitors from campus because the Users spreadsheet has about 300 logins via WebAuth. This is only taking those folks to the UA on iTunes U's public page unless they've been set-up with privileges to upload to iTunes U and/or edit a particular page. We're just rolling this out and so far have only established privs for Prof. Jim Collins to upload tracks for his MIC205A course. I'm meeting this morning with Chris Jansmann in Career Services to see if his privs are working and we're setting up privs for a couple others. Jim Collins' experience has required some additional attention from Casey Boettcher, the LTC's programmer/developer, who has been working on the authentication piece. It worked fine when I met with Jim last Thursday but then didn't work on Friday when Jim tried to upload a new track.

We had 9,388 non-WebAuthvisitors tracked by Apple.