Reading this made me think about a couple of things:

1. It’s not terribly obvious how iTunes U works
2. Is iTunes U Web2.0 and does it matter?

How iTunes U works

In the email discussion, David Davies stated “iTunesU is simply an RSS aggregator with a fancy presentation layer.” This is a nice succinct way of putting it but if you’re not up on your technologies, this might not immediately make sense. If we compare iTunes U with YouTube the first major difference is that YouTube is a hosting service. You upload your material on to computers run by YouTube (or indeed Google, since they bought YouTube) and they in turn “serve” the content. When you view a YouTube video, it’s coming from a YouTube server. In contrast, iTunes U is not a hosting service. Making your podcast available via iTunes U does not involve uploading it to an Apple server somewhere. You do still have to put your content on to a server that can be accessed by the outside world but that server is not part of iTunes U. The most common model is for academic institutions to host the files on their own servers. They then provide information to iTunes U (I’m not going to get into technical details but suffice to say RSS is a big player) which it then packages up and displays to users through the iTunes application.

So iTunes U is essentially just a glossy front end for content being hosted elsewhere.   What about all those people who don’t or can’t use iTunes?  How do they access the content? Well, if iTunes U was the only way to get to it, this would indeed be a problem.  Here at QM, we don’t have iTunes on our teaching service computers on campus so that would rule out access to materials for a lot of our students!  However  iTunes U should only be viewed as one distribution mechanism.  At the time that Oxford and Cambridge launched on iTunes U, I noted that Oxford had very obviously made their content available via an alternative mechanism (Oxbridge launch on iTunesU). Indeed, back to the JISC email thread, someone from Warwick shows how the same content can be accessed through iTunes U, GoogleReader or a good old standard web page.  Same content, different ways to access it, all with the minimum of fuss. What’s more web than that?

What about Web2.0?

So where does Web2.0 come into it? I have to admit that I don’t want to put words into the mouth of the person who posed the original question on the JISC mailing list, I’m not entirely sure what they were referring to when they talked about “web/web2 infrastructure”. What immediately came to my mind is that iTunes U is not Web2.0. For me, Web2.0 applications are all about community building, networking and sharing. YouTube allows you to leave comments on content, rate it, create your own playlists which you can share etc. These things are not possible on iTunes. For the end user, it’s pretty much a one way mechanism…it’s a shop front. So why bother?

Barry Cornelius, from Oxford University, gave a talk at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2009, called Time for iTunes U. In his talk (slide 82 onwards) he gives some statistics gathered since Oxford’s launch on iTunes U in October 2008 including:

• Visitors to the standard Oxford University web site increased 20% on the day of the iTunes U launch
• It is estimated in the first 7 days on iTunes U, there were 168000 visits to the Oxford University site and 60000 downloads
• A fortnight after the launch, Oxford University had 22 entries in the top 100 downloads from iTunes U

So, it’s a pretty effective shop front!

So, when thinking about iTunes U, it’s really a question of putting it in context amongst the plethora of ways there are for getting content out there into the world…YouTube (and its ilk), virtual learning environments, web sites. Again, Barry Cornelius’ talk (ok, his slides) does a very good job of describing the types of organisation wide processes and planning that were required to make Oxford’s iTunes U experience a success. It’s something that really needs a good deal of thought and commitment across an institution to get the most out of it.

I have to admit that I’ve largely ignored the Googleability question that was also a major feature of the original discussion. This is largely because I was more interested in the Web2.0 issue as I saw it. Those interested in this aspect should read the original thread…I’m not entirely sure the question was ever really answered.

Photo Credit

jakebouma on Flickr

Whatever the reasons, there is obviously the inevitable marketing material intended to entice the best students, information on applying, on interviews and on student life in general. However there’s already a lot of content across the spectrum of subject areas…Medieval English, Nanotechnology, Genomics, Phonetics, First World War Poetry, Anglo Saxon Art…

On first glance it looks like Oxford has the edge at the moment in terms of the quantity of material available. It seems obvious there’s been a serious push across the entire institution to make this work. They’ve also thought about it and provided access to the material through a good old website (Podcasts from the University of Oxford) for those people who don’t have or don’t want to use iTunes. Cambridge might have something similar but I haven’t come across it yet.