iTunesU for Schools?

At the end of last week Matt (@mattdean26) and I went up to Apple to the iTunesU briefing. A little while ago we mentioned to the lovely Sofia (our Apple person for the regional training centre work) that iTunesU could be a really good tool for schools as well as the Universities it is currently used in. I was surprised to find when we got there that we seemed to be the only school there (although there were some authorities present- including our own).

To me this suggested that either not many schools know about iTunesU, or that it wasn’t really a tool we could/should be using. Not entirely sure of either of those two statements at the moment so this blog post is a short summary of what it is, how it could be used, and some thoughts about whether it should be.

iTunesU is an area of the main iTunes Store that educational institutions can use. Each institution gets their own page (much like an artist in the main store), and they can fill their area with audio, video, or pdf documents. The great thing about this is it works in exactly the same way as the rest of the iTunes Store, so staff and students have a really easy way to browse and subscribe to your content. From there it can be synchronised onto any of the Apple iPod/iPhone/iPad devices.

iTunes is available on Mac or PC so there’s no tie in to the Mac operating system, but to get it on to a portable device from iTunes you do have to own an Apple branded one. How many of you know the percentage of your student body that have an iPod? That will be the key question to ask here.

An interesting thing for me that I didn’t realise is institutions host the content themselves, the iTunes Store just links to it. Obviously positives and negatives here (and the Universities present really didn’t seem keen on hosting their own content), but for me this is a good thing. Apple do do some caching of media for ‘performance’, but you have to do the hosting. This means that in theory we can still have one single repository for all our work, the iTunes Store just looks at that.

The other interesting part is there are two versions of the iTunesU pages. An institution can have a public page (this is the one anybody can see), but you can also have a private area. iTunesU will authenticate against your own systems, allowing you to have a completely different set of content available to your staff/students. Of the examples we saw none had implemented this yet, but I can see how it could potentially be a useful tool.

I think this loosely covers how it works, do ask questions if I’ve missed anything or go have a browse of it yourself. We saw the OU, Birmingham City University, and Stanford held up as good examples. I’m currently downloading the Stanford Uni iPhone App development lecture series, looks cool. (all these links open up in iTunes)

What we should do with it is the other part…

Apple have some rules about who can join the store, the most significant being that you need 150 pieces of unique content to start with. You also need a good policy in place for refreshing that content. For a large school like us 150 isn’t too scary and we refresh often enough, but what kind of content we put there is more of the problem.

I can see this being a great tool for use at an LA level for staff CPD for example. LTS have been doing this for ages now, and it works really well. So, we could start to place training material, maybe revision content for students or captured versions of certain lessons on there. But, I can only see this working for content staff (or certain students?) create. What do we do with all the other great work our students create? I guess it could go up there, but is it good enough to be publicly available? Is publicly available safe enough? How would we categorise their work into albums/podcasts? And, another good one that came up- who owns the student work?

The other good question surrounding how appropriate a tool it would be for an individual school is about the correct place to store all our media content. Our position has always been that we should be capable of supporting any device any of our users want to use, and wherever possible our technology should be useable on as many of them as possible. This is why we have so much open source around, why we switched to Gmail recently, etc, etc. Clearly iTunesU is at its best when you are putting your content onto your iPod, but what do we do about users of other devices? Also, what about displaying our work elsewhere? If we move video content to iTunesU should it be on the website as well? What about YouTube? Basically, yes to all of these but we need to work out how to achieve that without duplicating work.

I drew this little diagram on the train to try and explain the ideal:

At the moment we have a central web-based media server we call Wildern TV built by a company called Trilby. Any user can upload media to it, they select the subject and an appropriate level for the content and a team of student moderators approve it before it appears on the site. What I would like to achieve is an enhancement to this system. When a user uploads content they would also get to choose which of the school systems it appears on (so public/private website, iTunesU, YouTube, internal display screens). The moderation job then takes into account whether the content would also be appropriate for those locations, they approve the bits they want and the back-end setup encodes the videos correctly and tags them up in all the right places. We would also need to look at how to sync content to other mobile devices, although I suspect RSS feeds would cover it. Also very interested in HTML5 for this lot too, but that’s another blog post waiting to happen.

So, in short. iTunesU is definitely something you should be looking at if you have a LA responsibility, and in school is a definite maybe. We’ll take all this into our department meetings now for next stages, updates here as and when we decide.

Image source- iPod + iTunes Ad CC licensed by Ben A on Flickr