Collegiate Times: "Itunes U" stinks

You reference the "Collegiate Times editorial board" as if that's some sort of credentials. This is one student at Virginia Tech who clearly doesn't know all the ways some schools are putting iTunes U to work for them.

This whole discussion [ for me at least ] proves that many people do not understand the learning process, how different people learn, and how silly their thoughts are in the whole scheme of things. For example:

- Why do we have textbooks? Surely we could just read those and not need the teachers.
- Why have books when you have audio books?
- Why have pencils and pens? highlighters and markers?
- Why do we have printers when we have computer displays?
- What does a grade really measure? It definitely does not measure how much you know about Calculus or English 101.
- And then there are educational TV shows. Have they replace schools? Have they replaced pre-school? hmm.

- Do people fear students skipping class because they can watch the video of it, or do the fear being taped for all to see again? [legitimate concern]
- The whole kids skipping class argument seems logically similar to the HPV vaccination promoting sex.

Anyhow, If you are interested, go look at what iTunes U offers. I believe you can add DRM to the content, limit who has access, and automate the whole process with Pod Cast Producer. Check it out, and at least read what 'iTunes U at a glance' says. it can be found at the bottom of the main page for iTunes U.

http://itunesu.com which redirects you to http://www.apple.com/education/products/ipod/itunes_u.html

Podcast Producer
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/podcastproducer.html

Personally, I don't think they should do it. Anything that might help a student learn, could mean lower enrollment, as students will retake fewer classes. And we all know that will lead to fewer dollars for the university. :^... ;o)

I think that podcasting should support any face-to-face teaching, it's an ideal way of supplementing the existing coursework. Ideas presented in lectures, tutorials and seminars can be further illustrated to the students in their own time if they so wish. I was always taught to read around the subjects I did and having extra information that would be readily accessible when I needed it like this would have been great.

However having worked in a couple of UK Universities and knowing how far the lecturing staff are stretched by having to produce and run lecture courses, the administration of these modules and on top of that also doing their research and producing papers, I can understand the academic resistance to having to do extra work to produce suitable supporting podcasts.

In the last institution I worked at it was quite interesting to see the split between the older members of staff who resisted and poopooed the idea of podcasting and the younger lecturing staff who embraced it and started recording their lectures for the students.

Also you are looking at extra costs for the institutions in producing and distributing these podcast. With each individual IT manager having to budget and provide resources for, hardware, software and staff.

I think the next few years will be very interesting in the area of e-learning.

My digital logic design teacher is now posting podcasts of lecture. I don't go to class all the time, but I surely am more alert at 1am to watch the lecture then at 9:30.

To the professor who said that students need to quit thinking they're smarter than you are: thats not what we think. Just realize that you are probably terrible at teaching, maybe somehow was given tenure because of buying your students pizza before teacher evaluations to get good reviews, or are too ignorant to embrace technology.

I'm not saying iTunes U is good, because I haven't used it. But a vcast is, in general, a very reliable way to get your point across.

The Feynman lectures on physics are on iTunes. audio only of course. but you can read along and look at the pictures in your book. My recollection of college physics amounts to professors that were more interested in humiliating students than teaching, and TAs that I could barely understand.

In the UK we have the Open University, a private (I think) university which operates as a ‘correspondence school’ previously described as tired and ineffective (with a little help from the BBC, who screen and co-produce its educational programmes) . Courses take longer (quite often double—6 years instead of 3 for a non-sandwich-year degree) to complete, because they're often undertaken part-time whilst students are in full-time employment, which certainly skews its demographic (and by extension its stats) somewhat, but it's worth noting that it's one of the most highly-regarded academic institutions in the country.

Randolph, Christopher, et. al., not everybody learns in the same way. There are many students for whom a classroom environment is absolutely not the best way to learn. Some students have problems following a lecture the first time through due to learning disabilities. Others on the other end of the spectrum (like myself) absorb material far more rapidly than the professor typically explains it, and find the slow pace of the average lecture to be an exercise in frustration. (I won't even go into how irritating it is to have class time monopolized by students who are obviously behind the curve on their own studies asking questions to which the answers should be immediately obvious.)

Randolph - "The process of education is not a passive receipt of information. It is an involved exchange of ideas requiring interaction between students and instructors." Unfortunately, all of the students I've know who share your belief have been first-class time-wasters, burning up class time espousing their own off-base and uneducated opinions. I don't come to a university to sit through another student's "exchange of ideas." I don't care about the other students' ideas. I am paying for the professor's ideas.

Even if the other students are asking good questions, the questions might not be relevant to my major. If I'm taking bio 101 in preparation for a career in the medical field, and someone else is taking it as part of a marine biology major, their questions are not going to be relevant to me and vice versa.

Additional course material available online is a godsend for me. It's the modern version of putting the textbook and lecture notes on loan at the school library. It allows me to review course material in my own environment, at my own pace, on my own time. And, yes, sometimes I do use it as a substitute for going to lecture. So what of it? Not all students are alike - why is it such an affront to find out that the "one size fits all" approach doesn't work for students like me?

As a secondary complaint, changing the title of the post without a notice that an update or edit has been made is shoddy reporting, even by blog standards.

I understand this is simply to correct a mistake, but that should be stated.

It is working well in many places. See Penn State, for example.

Speaking as a mac using teacher I'd have to say it all depends.

There is definitely a benefit to having a teacher and student in actual 2-way communication, which usually means face-to-face. That said there is definitely room for different methods of teaching and using a podcast of the material as a supplement to the classroom rather than a substitute certainly has a place in the education we will have in years to come.

I would personally be surprised if podcasting ever completely replaces the classroom, but at the same time I'm not surprised to see academics and especially senior ones protesting it, and in a few years time grumbling and succumming to the inevitable. Some already are of course: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/5013194.stm