TCD lectures and other stuff are up on iTunes Store

Stargal

From today's Irish Times:

Trinity video lectures available online
JOHN COLLINS
TRINITY COLLEGE Dublin has become one of the first universities outside the US to make videos of lectures and other academic material available to download from the internet.

Since yesterday, select course material from Trinity has been available free through Apple’s iTunes download service. Using Apple’s software, audio and video files, including course lectures, public lectures, presentations on college life and material from the recently-opened Science Gallery, can be downloaded.

TCD is one of the first universities outside the US to make content available using the iTunes U service. US colleges. including Stanford, Berkeley, Duke University and MIT, have been providing course lectures, language lessons, lab demonstrations and campus tours on iTunes U.

Trinity College has been recording some lectures for two years now, according to John Murphy, acting director of TCD Information Systems Services.

“That content has been made available internally for our own students,” said Mr Murphy. “I think that was one of the reasons Apple was interested – as we were already halfway there.”

Mr Murphy said he expected videos of lectures to be primarily used as an aide-memoire by students, but the potential was there to use it as the basis for distance learning in the future.

Content available at launch includes courses in immunology, education and computer programming, a virtual tour of the university, student profiles, outlining their college experience, and the inauguration of the provost, Dr John Hegarty.

Public lectures available include addresses from investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, scientist and broadcaster Prof Robert Winston, Indian author Anita Desai and the First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond.

Dr Hegarty pointed out that, with its foundation in 1592, TCD is the oldest university featured on iTunes.

Epic Tissue

Sounds like a good idea, I might look into a few.

I hate itunes though.. ah well.

meh. just another excuse for people to skip lectures.

Trinity just trying to get one over the 'Blackboard' system in UCD.

preilly79

Deleted User wrote: »

meh. just another excuse for people to skip lectures.

Trinity just trying to get one over the 'Blackboard' system in UCD.

I can only see lectures with audio only. and the audio is pretty crap at that.

this would be excellent for part time or evening students that sometimes just can't make it to classes because of work.

Jonathan

They can feck off if they think im going near that horrific piece of software just to download a few podcasts... :mad:

xebec

There's nothing especially new about this, except for the fact that the lectures and other audio files are grouped with some advertising for TCD. From what I saw, there's only 6 courses with any content up there at the moment. One of those I studied last year, and the lecturer has been podcasting the lectures for a few years, so it's just really an advertising vehicle for Trinity.

As for getting one over Blackboard... It's not really the same thing, blackboard isn't publically available. The equivalent system in Trinity is WebCT, which isn't used as much or as efficiently as Blackboard is.

Ron DMC

• No idea what this looks like at the moment as you need local access, but last time I checked this was full of lots of test materials etc for what was presumably an early version of what went into this iTunes project - http://podcast.tcd.ie/
  
• Very interesting lectures from the Long Room hub series (these are also on iTunes afaik). - http://www.tcd.ie/longroomhub/Podcasts/index.php
  
• Trinity FM podcasts (some better than others) - http://www.trinityfm.com/podcast/
  
• Lastly, a set of short pieces on popular courses we recorded aimed at prospective students, and a brief description of student life in general (apologies for the quality of some of the audio on the Student Life one, I had people talking into the wrong mike). - http://www.tcd.ie/podcasts/

Feel free to add any others you may know of, might even be worthy of a thread of its own.

Epic Tissue

The UCD blackboard system seems pretty good, I wish Trinity would use their webCT, well I wish my lecturers would.

the flananator

Dr Hegarty pointed out that, with its foundation in 1592, TCD is the oldest university featured on iTunes.

:pac: Great input from Heggers there!

Jonathan

the flananator wrote: »

:pac: Great input from Heggers there!

Heggobot knows best :D