Liberal Studies This Week

Well, my goal of 2 weekly blog posts was dashed on the rocks of spring registration. Hopefully I’m back on track this week although I have to admit that my brain is still shut down from too many hours staring at a DARS report.

On to more important matters – have you ever heard of iTunesU? If you are a regular iTunes user, you may have noticed that when you search for content, iTunes searches across all categories: songs, movies, television program, podcasts, apps, and iTunesU. For example, if you search for parliament, you get great funk albums, political podcasts from Great Britain, season one of Babylon 5 (I’m not sure why), and an entire page of educational content from iTunesU.

iTunesU is a way for member schools to provide content through the iTunes Store. Like most podcasts, the content is free. This is a great outreach tool for schools since more than 200 million iTunes user world-wide can access their educational content as easily as they can download a copy of ‘Thriller’. You may be able to supplement what you are learning in your classes. Struggling in a philosophy course? Maybe Philosophy for Beginners from University of Oxford might help. It is also a great course tool since iTunesU campuses can also limit access to content so some content may be available to the world and other content may password limited to students enroll in a particular class.

UIS first became an iTunesU school in January 2007. I’m not completely sure, but my understanding is that at that point, we had an iTunes server but we weren’t linked into the iTunes Store – you had to come to the UIS website to access our content. This past summer, UIS was accepted for listing in the iTunes store so now if you type my last name into iTunes, you’ll find the podcasts that I did last year (I feel like a minor celebrity.)

You can search for UIS in iTunes or you can go directly to the UIS iTunesU page here You’ll find a variety of content from Speakers Series recordings, to campus community podcasts, to the podcasts used in online courses like the new LIS 460 The Beatles: Popular Music and Society. Dr. Cheney, who created this course and the podcasts, says that they have gotten a lot of attention since UIS was accepted into the iTunes Store – 56,000 download or previews in the last three months.