Oxbridge launch on iTunesU
Oxford and Cambridge have now joined the (still small) ranks of UK Higher Education institutions publishing on iTunesU. The simultaneous launch has prompted some to speculate that this is just the latest battleground for the old rivals (see Oxford v Cambridge: battle of the podcasts in the Guardian Education). Obviously Oxford and Cambridge deny this and state that they are "widening access".
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.