Congratulations go out to Gregory Anderson, SSA, Sr. in OSCR, who is our Podcast Producer guru. Gregory was dealing with a challenging problem - automatically posting tracks to iTunesU from Podcast Producer workflows. Yesterday he discovered Mac OS X 10.5.4: Cannot post podcasts to iTunes U in an Apple Support resource for Mac "OS X 10.5, Mac OS X Server 10.5" that solved the problem. I think he had previously contacted Apple tech support about this but hadn't found anyone who knew this solution. He also shared his find on the Apple support forums for iTunes U administrators.
So, what does this mean to you, to me, to faculty on campus. A key aspect of Podcast Producer's routines goes like this. Professor Snarf is in the ILC teaching a gen ed class to 223 students. Prof. Snarf has been set up in Podcast Producer so that he starts a recording process for a class lecture and when the class/recording is over, the audio is sent to the server, processed and with Gregory's fix, it is automatically passed along to his course podcast in iTunes U.
Here's an example. The Linguistics Department's Dr. Amy Fountain has been recording guest speakers the past year and uploading the audio to iTunes U. Linguistics has quite the robust podcast series going with over 30 tracks. Gregory can set Podcast Producer up to manage these lectures and, we think, significantly streamline the process.
During fall semester we'll be piloting Podcast Producer. I am optimistic that this resource will pave the way to a great increase in the number of faculty and departments who participate in iTunes U.
Leave a comment