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.
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