Australian university subjects on iTunes U

Since the launch three years ago, hundreds of universities across the world have flocked to iTunes U, Apple’s platform for hosting university course content, lectures and pod casts. Now La Trobe is about to become the first Australian university to run full subjects through the program. Twelve Australian universities – ANU, Deakin, La Trobe, QUT, RMIT, Swinburne, Melbourne, UNSW, Bond University, Southern Cross University and University of Queensland and Griffith have made use of the service to host everything from lectures to advertising, key note speeches and how-to videos. Overseas, universities including Oxford, Stanford and Harvard provide – for free – entire lecture series for courses, while their enrolled students make use of a mobile application that allows them to access additional course content such as assessments and readings. At La Trobe, senior lecturer in history and politics Stefan Auer is one of the first to take the plunge, with his undergraduate subject The European Union in the New Millennium, which is taken by second and third-year students, being the first of two subjects to be hosted in their entirety on ITunes U, the other being an English literature subject, The History of Children’s Literature. “The most exciting new aspect for me is while there were parts of the subject that I made available on iTunes U for the last two years or so, we now can present the whole subject to anyone who is interested, and I find that quite exciting,” he said. “I use iTunes myself when I try to catch up with the other academics at other unis, so I’m a consumer, too.” Students at La Trobe’s city and regional campuses will be able to enroll in the subject, along with students at Macquarie University, Newcastle University and Murdoch University. La Trobe has experimented with various modes of online learning and course delivery before, ranging from the Moodle platform to simply recording lectures on DVD and mailing them out, but Auer said iTunes was “much neater” and fits in better with what the university wanted to do. “[The subject] will be available to anyone who is interested,” he said. “It will all be there.” In addition to the expected lectures are interviews with prominent EU studies practitioners and academics, including various European ambassadors, some of which were conducted in Australia in front of a small group of students at La Trobe. But they will also include interviews Auer has conducted in Europe, such as one with a former German foreign minister. “It’s great fun for me to do it but it’s also great beneficial for my students to be exposed to a number of perspectives on the EU, especially in the current crisis,” he said. As universities move their content onto platforms like ITunes U they will be confronted with the problem of how to generate income from the material that they have resourced and for which they have provided the intellectual pedagogical framework. But at La Trobe that problem is not pressing, a university spokesman told Campus Review the institution was not worried about subject content being stolen and used elsewhere because it was protected by copyright laws. “People can use the material but they won’t get the qualification,” he added. “What we’re trying to do is give people a taste of what they would get if they came out and studied at La Trobe. They will get the materials that are in those [subjects] but we have 400 courses and these are just tasters.” In a way Australian universities are just testing the waters on the benefits of using something like ITunes U. At Deakin for example, it is being used to raise its research profile amongst prospective students and staff. Individual academics with interesting research, or “hot topics”, as the university’s director of knowledge media, Christine Walker, calls them, are approached and recorded, with the results uploaded. “It’s not course delivery, it’s kind of an added value to what our people are teaching because typically those hot topics are what students want to know about,” she said. The university has also posted learning-aid videos such as a video on how to make a video, which was extremely successful. Other posts have included lectures by high-profile speakers such as Noam Chomsky. “One of items was featured on the first page of iTunes in the first month, and we got 79,000 downloads in the month, so that was very good,” said Glenn McNolty, Deakin’s development manager. “Now I think we’re receiving something like 300,000 downloads a month. You can tell where they’re coming from, what part of the world, so we’ve seen a lot of downloads from Japan, England, china, India.” Other universities are not too far behind La Trobe. Swinburne has also taken to the platform with great enthusiasm. Most of its offerings, which attract around 1928 downloads a day, are open education resources, including podcasts of individual lectures and speeches from a range of departments, along with tutorials on computer programming and design. Swinburne’s pro-vice chancellor of learning, transformations, Gilly Salmon, said the university was moving towards being an open-content institution, and saw iTunes as providing a prototype. What was interesting, she said, was the way it was impossible to guess what might be popular with the wider public. “ It’s like any social media, you can put content up and you cannot tell what going to go viral and what’s going to get no interest at all,” she said. “[But] there’s no doubt it puts materials out to completely new audiences. It really is a way of awareness-raising across the world. You can get millions of downloads by people who’ve never heard of you before, just because they are interested in something.” She said that at Swinburne, nearly every student has an Apple mobile device… [in the future] we’re going to have a whole mobile learning strategy, and being able to put things easily into iTunes is critical. “Students download their music from iTunes, and they’ll download their course materials at the same time.” Salmon said the university was not planning to entirely rely on Apple, however. “It’s one of a number of channels that Swinburne will be using to take its learning materials out to the world,” she said. “Nobody chooses just one channel these days.” La Trobe's iTunes U page can be found here (link launches iTunes)

Australian university subjects on iTunes U

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Australian Signals Directorate

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