Members of the Learning Technologies Center are currently in a few locations at this time awaiting our link in the chain of organizational change to open space for us all in the Manuel Pacheco Integrated Learning Center (ILC) area. Professor Debra Tomanek, The Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, is the new Vice Provost for OIA.

Report and Recommendations from the Taskforce on Undergraduate Education, Gail D. Burd, Ph.D.,
Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost,
July 26, 2009

Dr. Bernard Baars is teaching an online course for the Center for Consciousness Studies, a Center in the Psychology Department. He has his first track, Introduction to the Webcourse, in the iTunes U course site and it was downloaded 74 times last week and browsed 35 times (browses are when students and other visitors double click to play the track in iTunes instead of downloading it directly to their computer). I think that shows the kind of public exposure that an iTunes U site can bring.

Dr. Elaine Marchello's Trad104 Human and Animal Interrelationships from Domestication to the Present podcast for "Animism and Totemism and Animals in Mythology" had 131 downloads and 73 browses. This is one of the fall 2009 Centennial Hall courses, so it's interesting to track the students use of podcasts.

Download the Public site spreadsheet and/or the Private site.

• Limit the number of clicker questions to five per class
• Use PowerPoint to prepare, manage, and display questions
• Reserve questions for specific learning outcomes and goals (What do you want to stress? What cognitive skills do you want to develop? What do you want to reinforce?)
• Allot enough time and use an on-screen timer.
• Check for ambiguity
• Create questions that support peer discussion and instruction
• Use a variety of assessment question types
• Bring index cards for students who forget their clickers
• Consider not just the answer, but the cognitive processes used

Go to iTunes U [iTunes link] to see any of these.

Beyond Campus
Arab American National Museum
Asian Art Museum
Sante Fe Institute
V&A Victoria and Albert Museum
Washington National Opera

K-12
Catholic Network Australia
Florida Department of Education
Nebraska Department of Education
PLC Perth and Scotch College
Western Australian Department of Education and Training

I've written up responses to the questions we jotted down on the white board and referring you to some webpages we have about iTunes U and podcasting. Feel free to contact either us for more information.

Contact Gregory to set up a Podcast Producer workflow that streamlines getting your audio and/or video onto iTunes U.

As a consultant on learning technologies, I'll be glad to talk to you how to fit podcasting into your pedagogy, what other resources might work instead of, or in addition to, podcasting, and examples of podcasts in your discipline.

If you prefer to download a Word version of this entry, you may download it here:
Podcasting Workshop Follow-Up

• LTC's Podcasting Website Faculty page
• What is the UA's iTunes U?
• UA on iTunes U FAQs
• Stuart's Blog

"Copyright protection of the recording as a general rule means that a person cannot, without the express permission of the copyright owner, duplicate or rearrange the actual sounds that make up the recording. Even taking a small amount of the original sounds will implicate a copyright right; in the words of one recent appellate court decision: "get a license or do not sample." Consequently, even minor reproduction or arrangements require express permission of the copyright owner." [http://tinyurl.com/yzmjk4o]

Here is an example related to music. When I was teaching a course about information technology, I was discussing standards in one of podcasts. I wanted to use an image from a Sinatra album "Sinatra Sings the Standards" and a short audio clip. However, since my podcast had nothing to do with Sinatra, I did not use in respect to the rights and permissions of owner of that music.

If you need a copy of a release form go to LTC's staff page and scroll down to the LTC Documents & Policies section for iTunes/YouTube Release form.

Podcasting & My Blog
I maintain a blog related to my work at the UA and post entries related to podcasting, iTunes U, and other educational technologies that I manage and work with. I mentioned in the workshop that Apple sends a spreadsheet formerly on Mondays but just changed to Wednesdays, that show the number of times a track in the UA's iTunes U is downloaded, each time someone double clicks a track in its list to play it rather than download, how man discrete visitors our site received during the previous week, and more. I upload the spreadsheets to my blog and anyone can download them to see how much use their tracks are receiving. You will also find the report I wrote about student attendance and courses recording lectures in a recent entry.

The UA's Private iTunes U versus the Public Site
Another thing I had to rush through was the difference between the private site and the public site. The private site is useful when your content contains private information (such as College of Medicine courses), content that is permissible according to Fair Use but you don't what to have a life after the course, student work (yes you can have students doing podcasts for their coursework), or if you want to podcast your lectures but not to the world. Access to the private site is restricted by logging in via WebAuth and then only for the students registered for the course.

Why encourage use of the public site? For one thing, the UA is a publicly funded university and as everyone knows, receiving adequate funding is a challenge. If faculty record their lectures and make them publicly accessible, it is a way that the university can give back to the State. Apple's iTunes U is a tremendously popular educational resource. There are likely people who are interested in what you are teaching would follow podcasts of your courses out of personal interest. FYI, we are averaging between 40,000 - 50,000 visitors a week to the UA's iTunes U public site.

While I won't take this discussion too much further, I want to mention that there are universities with an institutional commitment to providing course lectures to the public at large. Many use iTunes U as well as streaming them from institutional websites and placing them on YouTube. It's an international consortium (see its members list) and from the USA includes MIT, UC, Irvine, Notre Dame, Tufts, UMass Boston, and Hopkins School of Public Health. UC, Berkeley has been capturing video of many of its courses and posting the video to iTunes U and its YouTube channel.

How to Record and Software that Exports to iTunes/iPod Formats
This is a big topic and I encourage you to get in touch with me for more information and finding what is right for you. Short of that, here are some points.

• Audio-Only - The easiest way to make a podcast is audio-only because it requires the least amount of preparation and time. The software you need is free and exports to MP3 audio format which can be played by many freely available and commonly used players (Windows Media Player, Apple's QuickTime and iTunes, Real, Winamp). For PC users I recommend Audacity, free software that works beautifully. For Mac users GarageBand is bundled in the iLife series that Apple installs on all its computers. GarageBand has many more capabilities, such as embedding images throughout making it more of a slide show. Also, you can embed a URL in any image so that students can pause the podcast, click the image and go to the site in their browser. GarageBand podcasts are not MP3 files and are played in QuickTime or iTunes. I've given people 1:1 hands-on to get started with GarageBand, so just holler if interested.
• I have digital recorders that I will lend you that are easy to use (I have step-by-step instructions) and come with an armband. Dr. James Collins, who spoke at the Monday workshop has used one for 3-4 semesters, as has Amy Fountain. Amy still uses it for the Linguistics Lectures speakers series, but has gone to Podcast Producer the past 2 semesters for her class to include her audio with her Powerpoint. Jim probably will for his next course.
• If you record to your computer, I recommend a USB headphone-microphone combination. You can get one at Best Buy or Radio Shack and they run around $25-$35. The quality with USB is vastly superior to the old style mics that plug into your computer with jack. Also, if you have a Mac that is only 1-2 years old, you should have audio/video built-in. I've used this for recording instead of the headphone microphone and it's been quite good. If you're in an area with additional noise, though, it will pick up some of that.
• If you want to make your own podcasts that involves screen capture, many of us have used and had success with TechSmith's Camtasia Studio. Camtasia Studio was recently released for Macs so itnow works on PCs and Macs. Once installed you record over a Powerpoint presentation, and record over screen capture of other software, such as a Web browser. The beauty is that you can then export your creation to a format that plays in QuickTime, is encoded for working in iTunes, or Flash. In addition, TechSmith released Jing Project, more or less a free version of Camtasia with less features but still does screen capture. I like it for just-in-time training.
• Remember, Gregory can set up workflows that streamline the process.

Streaming Video versus Podcasting Video
Gregory explained that with streaming, for the most part, your students can't download the video. It requires encoding the video for a particular streaming format - such as QuickTime streaming, Windows streaming, Real streaming - and hosting it on a server running that streaming software. Costs are involved in providing streaming servers so you need to check to see what is available to you. With podcasting, the video file is pushed to a subscriber's computer running iTunes which puts that copy on her/his computer.

iTunes U as a Repository of Course/Program/Department Resources
Yaseen asked about using iTunes to host a collection of resources. This is a very good idea and we could talk about lots of reasons to do this. For example, a department might put a collection of resources together that they can point prospective students/majors to so they can get a better idea of the principles of the discipline and requirements. Eller's McGuire School for Entrepreneurship has already explored this idea and begun to develop its collection of resources.

iTunes U versus YouTube
Did you that the UA has a YouTube channel that is used to promote programs, student life, and our faculty and research accomplishments? You can find it at Our approach has been to use the YouTube as more of a marketing and promotional resource and to use the UA's iTunes U site as more of an academic resource. You can find out more about the UA's channel. Feel free to contact me about it - it is another of the projects with which I am involved.

As far as putting courses related materials on YouTube, there is no policy prohibiting it. If you start your own YouTube channel, though, you will run into limitations on file size and length of the video. As far as I know, you can't restrict access to your videos. YouTube allows users to make a video private and restrict access to up to 25 YouTube users, who you have to specify. And these users, presumably your students, would need to have YouTube channels of their own, log in to them and them go to access your videos. A bit more involved than placing them on iTunes U.

As you come with ideas and questions, feel free to get back in touch. Stuart's email | Gregory's email

• At Stanford University's School of Medicine -"Well-attended lectures were well-watched; poorly attended lectures were not watched. ... If you're bad, you're bad. If you're bad online, you're bad in lectures, students don't come."
• "Our students at Berkeley tell us that this is supplemental material, and it doesn't affect their decision to attend class."
• In 2008, 78 percent of undergraduate respondents to a University of Wisconsin at Madison study said they think having lectures available online would help them retain lesson material, and 76 percent said they believed it would help them improve their test scores.
• Two-thirds of the respondents to this year's annual study on undergraduate IT habits from the Educause Center for Applied Research strongly disagreed that having lectures posted on the Web would encourage them to cut class.
• At Purdue University, which is attempting to put standard lecture capture technology in 280 classrooms by next semester, faculty members said they would not even be willing to press a button at the beginning of class to initiate the recording, according to David Eisert, the manager of emerging technologies there.

What stands out in that week's usage? There were 206 downloads of the most recent Art & Identity: Artists Lecture Series track, "Repetition and Differentiation -- Lorna Simpson's Iconography of the Racial Sublime," 90 downloads of the mostly uploaded Linguistics Lecture track "Understood complements and com," and 81 downloads of the audio track " 34 Reoviridae" for Dr. James Collins VSC433 Medical and Molecular Virology class lecture. On the private side, Elaine Marchello's TRAD 104 Human and Animal Interrelationships from Domestication to the Present " Exotic Animals and HIstory of the Zoo" was downloaded 189 times. Her previous four lectures averaged ~175 downloads.

The study compared the test scores of introductory psychology students - some watched a recorded lecture available in iTunes and others attended the traditional classroom lecture. The results? Students who watched video scored an average of 71%. Students who sat through the 30-minute classroom lecture scored an average of 62%, and students who watched the video and took notes scored an average of 76%. Apparently being able to use the pause button accounted for the difference. Can't pause the prof giving the lecture and replay the last five minutes.

My conclusion is that attending the lecture and having video of the lecture for students to review is a way to enhance student learning.

The Arizona Health Sciences Center (AHSC) has featured several videos on its homepage that were uploaded to the UA's YouTube channel. These videos are well suite for the YouTube channel because of their value as public information pieces.

Dr. William Crist, VP for Health Affairs

UA Scorpion Antivenom Study Featured in NEJM

UMC Opens New Trauma Center and Emergency Department

When the Scorpion Stings

There is a good deal of literature available that shows that students do not cut class because audio and/or video of class lectures are available. We also have anecdotal information from UA faculty who are podcasting course lectures who tell us that they have not observed a decrease in class attendance. In fact, these faculty members report that students appreciate having the lectures available and use them to review for exams, clarify difficult points, and catch up when they miss class for legitimate reasons.

Download a PDF of my report Podcast Your Lectures or, why students will still attend class.

100 Serious Twitter Tips for Academics by Jill Gordon appears in the blog Best Colleges Online. The post correctly points out that Twitter "has grown into a powerful tool for business, communication, and education" and offers 100 tips on getting started, Twitter etiquette, strategies, ideas for instructors, benefits for students, tips for the class, assignments using Twitter, suggestions for people and things to track on Twitter, Twitter tools, Twitter tools for use in academia, andinding people in academia to follow.

Twitter.edu: Resources for using a micro-blog application in an academic setting is Elaine Edwards of Kansas State's blog devoted to using Twitter in higher ed. It's current and includes posts titled "ech Tips for Educators," "Suggested K-State Twitter Guidelines," and "Examples of Twitter Usage from other Universities."

Twitter Fan Wiki is an actual Twitter site that was "set this up as a place to post cool ideas, uses and feature requests for Twitter. Share anything you've found that you think the Twitter community might be interested in!" This site also has a directory of higher ed Twitter sites.

Public site week of October 11-17, 2009

Public site week of October 18-24, 2009

Private site week of October 18-24, 2009