Academic Technology Podcast
Episode 3

Kimberly: Hello and welcome to the third episode of the Academic Technology Podcast. I'm Kimberly Hayworth the manager of Academic Computing's Consulting and Multimedia Services Group.

Today I'll be interviewing Victoria Szabo about Stanford on iTunes U. Victoria is the Academic Technology Manager for the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education.
Thanks for coming in today, Victoria.

Victoria: Pleasure to be here.

Kimberly: So, what is Stanford on iTunes U?

Victoria: Stanford on iTunes is a collaboration between Stanford University and Apple Computer, the way of thinking about and managing audio, and, increasingly, video content, through the iTunes Store interface. It's been a wonderful opportunity for us at Stanford to think about how we can leverage a very popular tool that is used by faculty and students and staff already in their lives for academic purposes.

Kim: So, Victoria, I know there's a public version of iTunes that's available to anybody in the world. But are there other version of iTunes on campus?

Victoria: The project as it exists at Stanford has several components. We have a public site, which is a lot of content related to Stanford events, so there's faculty lectures, and there's musical performances, interviews, sporting events, lots of different types of audio content that are of general interest to the community. It was launched initially at an Alumni Weekend, and, subsequently, has gone on to be made available all over the world.
There's another component to the project, which is Stanford-only version of iTunes. This is attached to our course management system, called CourseWork. That version is accessed by people who are members of the Stanford community, through their SUNet authentication, so this is their Stanford ID. And what that does for us is that it allows us to control access to the content and make more content available that we otherwise wouldn't feel comfortable sharing with the universe. So this is used mostly in courses, faculty lectures, additional audio material that is designed to enhance the student experience of the text that they're reading. Sometimes there's speeches and poems, or also student performances—recordings of students doing final presentations or oral exams. We're looking at it also as a tool for students to review their own teaching, in the case of graduate students, and as a way for foreign language students to get practice by recording their own audio, or listening to audio or video that is made available to them by their instructors.
We also have a Stanford-wide site called the Stanford Community in iTunes it's meant to be a place for faculty staff and students to share content that might not be of interest to the general community, but which would be useful to people who are currently on campus. We have some content from the Center for Teaching and Learning; the writing program is putting content up, student presentations, performances; Environmental Health and Safety is putting some of their videos up; and the Center for Probing the Nanoscale. Lots of different groups are starting to think about how they can share the word about what they do in this format.

Kimberly: In fact, this Academic Technology Podcast series is also available in the Academic Computing area in the Stanford Community iTunes site.

So, as far as people posting, how would they go about getting their content up on either CourseWork or the community page, or the public site?

Victoria: CourseWork-related content is the easiest for members of the Stanford community to get access to, because it really takes advantage of the existing course management system. You, as an administrator or an instructor in a course, have the ability to upload content into your own personal iTunes area and then you can arrange that content into various tabs, and make that available to the students in the class. The students can then go and play back and download the content that you've put in there. They won't necessarily have the ability to upload, but there is also a drop-box functionality that you can choose to turn on for any individual tab. In addition, you can have students stare content in a tab, so they can be showing it not only to their instructor, in a one-way kind of communication, but with each other. In the Stanford community site, we haven't worked out a good authentication system, so that only people who own a specific area will be able to put their content into it. It's an all or nothing thing: if you can put something in the Center for Teaching and Learning, you can put something in the Center for Probing the Nanoscale. But that's something we're working on now with the IT Services here on campus. We're hoping to leverage our existing group management tools to make it easier to make that happen. On the public side, access to the iTunes environment is really through the Alumni Association, and through the Office of University Communications. Since that content is representing Stanford as a whole, we're making sure that has high production values, and that it's been carefully edited and vetted, so that it's appropriate for general use. Some of the content could conceivably go to any audience, but other content is specific to just a local audience.

Kimberly: So as far as getting an iTunes component for a CourseWork course, how do faculty go about getting that?

Victoria: Well, right now, the CourseWork-iTunes connection is still in beta, which means that it hasn't been fully integrated into the CourseWork system. It works quite well, but we haven't yet developed the support infrastructure to make it something that you can automatically get so if you do want to get it, you can go to the iTunes website, itunes.stanford.edu/coursework, and fill out a request form. What you'll need to do on that request form is indicate the course number and put in the names of the instructors and of the course so that we can go ahead and set that up. Once that happens, we'll go in behind the scenes and connect the iTunes environment to your CourseWork space and from that point forward, it'll act like any other tool within CourseWork.

Kimberly: So it'll show up in the left hand side with all the other course materials and syllabus and all of the other links that the students and faculty are used to.

Victoria: Exactly.

Kimberly: Great. So, Victoria, I know that I'm available for faculty who are interested in using iTunes for their courses, but can you talk about additional resources that may be available on campus for getting help with iTunes?

Victoria: Well, there's several different venues. If you're interested in learning more about creating audio content, you can visit Kim Hayworth. She's very experienced in audio recording and video recording, and has being doing a lot of work to enhance podcasts with other media types.

If you are trying to think about how or why you might want to use these types of media in your teaching, you might want to visit the Center for Teaching and Learning. If you have an Academic Technology Specialist associated with your department or unit, you can go to that person, and once you're actually using the tool, you can always submit a HelpSU ticket, selecting iTunes U as the specific area.

Kimberly: So, Victoria, where do you see this project, the iTunes U project, going in the future?

Victoria: We have lots of ideas about that. One thing we'd like to do is explore further how recording lectures can enhance pedagogy, so we really want to identify a few different courses, and try that out. We really want to make the lectures available to the students after the class, hopefully with text tracks, and perhaps with the slides that are associated with the lecture, attached to the same file, and to examine the extent to which that helps students to absorb the material in the lecture—lots of different people have different learning styles, and we're really hoping that making those resources available, especially in introductory courses, will benefit students. We're also thinking more about how we could use this content for advising. So, if students have specific areas of interests that they'd like to learn more about, then there would be a library of content available to them that they could listen to. In the Program of Writing and Rhetoric students do so much in the way of audio essays and presentations, we really want to think about how we can enable them to do more of that kind of work themselves, and to share it and do peer reviews with each other. So the writing program which is largely PC-based, is exploring how they might do that. Which is actually a good point about this project. The iTunes store is, of course, something that you can access through the iTunes program, and the iTunes program is both free and cross-platform. That was a huge factor in our deciding to go with the project, because it wasn't something that was going to be totally proprietary, it's something that all of our users could get access to if they wanted to. Many of our recordings are also in mp3 format, so people who don't have iPods can also use it. What we found is that a lot of our students will listen to the content on their computers anyway. It's a goal of ours to make everything as portable as possible. And in the future we hope to develop digital rights management strategies that will enable us to make more and more content available and portable. Right now we're somewhat constrained because we have to pay close attention to fair use guidelines. But the procurement of content is something that we're talking to Apple about, publishers about and to librarians as well.

Kimberly: I know that quite a few people really do just listen to podcasts on their computers. They don't necessarily even have an iPod or an mp3 player. So that's very, very common. The other advantage I find with podcasting in general is also the RSS, the subscribe feature. So you don't have to go to a website frequently and see if there's new content. If you subscribe to a podcast, it automatically shows up in your iTunes folder whenever there's new content available. So that's a wonderful feature.

Thanks so much,Victoria, for being with us today.

Well, that's it for the Academic Technology podcast episode three. Thanks for listening. Episode 4 will include an interview with Ed Carryer, a faculty member from the Design Group in Mechanical Engineering, about how he screencasts his course using a tablet PC and Camtasia screen capture software.

Links to information discussed in this podcast and other show notes are available online at acomp.stanford.edu/cams. Just click the Academic Technology Podcast link. You'll also find a link to our blog if you'd like to provide feedback or suggest topics for future podcasts.