TC Debuts on iTunes U
Open to the world - Teachers College joins a growing number of colleges on Apple's iTunes University store. The site will feature the scholarship and publicize the mission of the college.
Apple’s public site will feature TC’s scholarship and publicize its mission
Beginning this February, the world will be able to view, listen to, or read about different aspects of the Teachers College experience—on
The College’s decision to develop and maintain a site on iTunes U reflects a growing trend; indeed, the popularity of the iPod, Apple’s now-ubiquitous portable music player and the introduction into the vernacular of terms such as ‘podcasts’ and ‘mp3’ owe at least in part to academia’s ready grasp of the potential of these new technologies. “iTunes has a great many users,” says TC’s Larry Furnival, Manager, Academic Computing. “We felt it would be an excellent way to increase the visibility and accessibility of TC’s scholarship and to make the College’s mission and vision explicit for people across the country.”
TC’s Campaign for Educational Equity is already using TC’s iTunes U site to showcase lectures from its most recent Equity Symposium. This past October, Jessica Garcia, the Campaign’s Manager for Communications and Outreach, worked with TC’s Office of the Web to coordinate the recording and distribution of lectures during the Symposium, which focused on the changing role of U.S. courts in promoting educational equity. In order to accommodate the recording and subsequent uploading of audio to iTunes U during the event, Web specialists Paul Acquaro and Cameron Fadjo developed a system called ‘near-time podcasting’. This system involved preparing the audio introductions for each lecture before the event and then merging and uploading the lectures with the pre-recorded audio to iTunes—a technique that makes it possible to offer lectures to the world less than an hour after they have been conducted.
“People were very excited to hear that we were going to offer the Symposium on iTunes,” says Garcia. “We got calls from people in
“The main benefit to using iTunes is that it keeps on giving and it keeps promoting your work and your ideas,” she says.
Visitors to http://itunes.tc.columbia.edu will be able to access the public area of TC’s iTunes U site. In the near future, a non-public section for course-related and research materials will be made available to registered students, faculty and researchers. As of this publication, individuals within TC are being trained to produce, edit and load audio and video files to the site. These individuals, called iTunes U Specialists, will be available to support this initiative college-wide by aiding in the development process. The non-public area of iTunes U will allow faculty at TC to upload audio, video and PDF files associated with their class or research group. People accessing these materials will log in using their Columbia UNI and password.
For more information, please visit http://itunes.tc.columbia.edu.
Published Friday, Feb. 15, 2008
