Download the spreadsheet for the Private Site or the Public Site
December 2008 Archives
Download the iTunes U spreadsheets for the public site and the private site.
EDUCAUSE has a podcast series and a recent one is with Stephen Toback, Sr. Manager of Interactive Technology Services at Duke University. This EDUCAUSE podcast, was recorded on November 19, 2008, and accompanies Toback's annual conference presentation "Evolution of iTunesU and Its Role in the Duke Experience." Here are some of the points from the podcast.
- iTunes U is a critical part of media distribution services at Duke
- With so many other institutions participating in iTunes U, using iTunes U at Duke has moved from being a distribution medium to a source for accessing media from a wide range of universities, research institutions and museums.
- Podcasting will continue to play an important role in reaching our students and faculty. [I think this is an important point and one that I encourage everyone to share with instructors. There is such a wealth of content on iTunes U it is a shame it is not more integrated into many courses.]
- Podcasting via iTunes U is a complementary technology to video streaming.
- Podcasting works well in environments where the end-user needs a copy and with ubiquitous broadband, streaming becomes an approach to consider more widely. Exploring audio to text technology to make recordings more useful to students.
- iTunes U began as a place to store media, such as a speech in a class, that a prof wanted students to review and comment. And it was especially useful because because you could put it in a secured environment.
- Future: Toback sees it expanding to use with of documents and images. He notes that Adobe Acrobat 9 provides a platform for multimedia where you can produce collections of images, video and 3D data. You can create objects that rotate and users can look at them in real time. Perhaps researchers can put visualizations of things up in iTunes U so people can download it and look at it in real time.
- People should remember that iTunes U is a broad spectrum of things. It can be audio only, which can be just as valuable as an audio/video file.
Last week more new content was added to to iTunes U and the UA's YouTube Channel.
Physics Colloquium Series [view in iTunes U]
Heather encoded and added the UA branding to nine of the Physics Colloquium DVDs and I set up the site in iTunes and uploaded the videos. More will be added in the coming week as the time-consuming process of encoding and branding is completed. This is excellent content to get out to the public and further enhances the UA's sciences section in iTunes U. Dr. Elliott Cheu, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor of Physics, wrote: "Thanks so much for pursuing this. We really appreciate it and will continue to work with you on expanding this."
SIROW [view in iTunes U]
Last Tuesday I met with Bridget Ruiz, Associate Research Professor in the University of Arizona's Southwest Institute for Research on Women (SIROW), about adding a video SIROW produced (and staff starred in) about the importance of sleep. The video is produced with students as the intended audience. In addition to creating a SIROW site in the iTunes U's SBS section, I made a featured page for the video in the Students section. Heather re-encoded it because the version provided skipped on a number of PCs due to the bit rate used when the video was created. The new version works nicely and is available in iTunes U and also YouTube.
Dr. Andrew Weil [view in iTunes U]
We also got a video up in iTunes U of Dr. Weil's talk at the November 20th WellU program. Since Dr. Weil didn't use any visuals, I opened the video in QT Pro, converted it to a WAV audio file, brought that into Audacity, edited out the first several minutes of introductions and uploaded an MP3 audio version in addition to the video version. Good talk to sync to one's iPod and listen to in the car, while taking a walk, or working out.
Revised Main Page Features
Thurdsday, I revised the UA's main iTunes U main page to feature Dr. Weil, Snooze Fest and Brad Casper's Eller lecture (see Dec. 4 entry).
Coming later today Arizona Wet/Dry
Erin Westfall, a GIS Analyst at the UA's Water Resources Research Center, dropped off a DVD called Arizona Wet/Dry that was produced for the Arizona NEMO project. I used HandBrake to convert it. It was pretty big and Heather showed me a couple things to change that made the file size reasonable. This one will go up on YouTube and I'll set it up as a featured video on iTunes U as well.
Dr. Deborah Bass, Deputy Project Scientist for the Phoenix Mars Scout Mission
Jacob Egan of the Phoenix Mars Mission added four new videos of interviews: Deborah Bass, Michael Hecht (in two parts), and Leslie Tamppari. The interview with Deborah Bass was downloaded 624 times. Lots of people subscribing to the Mission's podcasts! VIsit the Phoenix Mars Mission's site on the UA on iTunes U.
Download last week's spreadsheets.
The UA's Writing Program sent over two DVDs with four videos that were produced in the spring of 2007. LTC's Media Services converted/encoded these videos and I uploaded them yesterday to YouTube. I created a new playlist for them: "First Year Composition: Orientation Videos for ENGL 101, 101" Drew Kopp, a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric, Composition & Teaching English, provided the titles and descriptions. You can view these directly at: ENGL 101 Orientation Video,
ENGL 101+ Orientation Video
Honors Composition Orientation Video, and The Southern Arizona Writing Project. I think these videos are also appropriate for the UA's iTunes U site and hope the program will agree.
Another new video is "Brad Casper: Leaving the Comfort Zone." This was a lecture given October 23, 2008, for the Eller College of Management Distinguished Speaker Series. Eller has had Media Services editing/encoding the Distinguished Speaker Series videos for some time and we have a lot of them on YouTube and on iTunes U. Great content and they promote the MBA program very well.
Will Sikes is a junior and plant science major is in Adaptive Athletics and competes in Men's Wheelchair Basketball. Will's video is the first in a series the LTC is doing on Adaptive Athletics. We hope to have at least one video for each sport. Hat's off to Tony and Luis Carlos for the excellent work that they did on these and the Peace Corps video in the next para.
"Amanda Kucich: Peace Corps Samoa Islands 2003-2005" is our latest video for the UA's Peace Corps Fellows program. BTW, one of the important reasons for campus departments to participate on the UA's YouTube Channel is to reach college-bound undergrads and undergrads looking at grad schools. On December 2nd, Georgia Ehlers, coordinator of internships and community engagement at the Graduate College, wrote: "In case you are wondering...the UA is the top recruiting school for Peace corps in our western region....I expect the you tubes help!"
Last night something with WebAuth broke our ability to log in to UA on iTunes U. This only had an impact on the private site where the med school has six secure sites. That was repaired at 10:26 p.m. Tuesday night. This morning the entire store crashed. I've not seen this before ... I like the broken link image.
click for larger version
I've been referring to a Noel-Levitz study, "Circling Over Enrollment: The E-Expectations of the Parents of College-Bound Students" for a couple months now. Came across it originally on a couple blogs last summer. The blog entries were by people who heard the study's PI speak about it at a conference. Within the last week, I noticed the report was now publicly available on the Noel-Levitz website. The results, I think, are important because they provide a laundry list of the expectations and behaviors of parents of college-bound students.
The study's PI is Stephanie Geyer, associate v-p at Noel-Levitz, and the data is drawn from the responses of 496 parents or guardians who said that they used the Web to help students research colleges and universities. The report details relationships, age, highest education or degree and family household income. Here's a snapshot of the findings.
How involved are parents? 70% stated they were doing at least some of the college research and paperwork for their children and 80% indicated that parent and child would agree upon a particular school together. Assuming (and yes I know what happens when we assume) that this is pretty representative of parents attitudes then parents are quite involved in this important choice.
Check out last week's stats for the UA on iTunes U.
