On March 30, 2007, Apple announce the launch of iTunes U, "a dedicated area within the iTunes Store (www.itunes.com) featuring free content such as course lectures, language lessons, lab demonstrations, sports highlights and campus tours provided by top US colleges and universities including Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Duke University and MIT." (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/05/30itunesu.html) The idea is to provide free access to educational media to students, teachers, or anyone interested in expanding their horizons (learning something new).
iTunes U is a free service accessed through itunes.com, that allows educators to post media in the AAC, MP3, MPEG-4 or PDF format for access by their students or the world. Access to content can be restricted to only a course's registered students, or open to anyone in the world. Downloaded media can be played on a computer, an MP3 player, an iPod, or iPhone.
For a short video introduction to iTunes U visit the iTunes section of the www.apple.com/education/moble-learning website, about mid-way do the page.
iTunes U offers approximately 200,000 audio and video files from colleges and universities around the world -- Oxford, Princeton, Yale, Cambridge, MIT. But one can also find content from museums and PBS (Public Broadcast Stations), as well as state education organizations. And the range is topics is amazing.
But does access to classroom lectures and a wide variety of educational materials mean that face-to-face classroom learning will no longer needed?
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No. At least not to me~
ReplyDeleteFor me maybe simply because I am too lazy to discipline myself for a long term of online study. You know, study can be painful...
But the more important reason lies on the crucial difference between iTunes U and face-to-face learning, interactive. I did two sides of a similar online teaching when I was in college, a teacher and a student. No matter how much I tried, I still couldn’t act as what I did in traditional classes.