Lectures on your iPod
For those who want to tune into something more serious than music, iTunes has something new: podcasts of TU Delft lectures. Since last Tuesday, the TU is officially on iTunes U.
(Illustration: Floris Wiegerinck)
Professor Hans van Dijk hasn't got much time for an interview. He's about to give a lecture about water management. A very special lecture: one that is not confined between the walls of an auditorium, but rather is accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. From now on all his lectures will be accessible on iTunes U, a section of Apple's digital media store reserved for educational material from universities.
“A lecture for a world public? Yes it is indeed”, the head of the Sanitary Engineering section (Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences) says, laughing. “But in our experience only incidentally do people from abroad look at them. They're mostly watched by students who are at home while we give the lecture. And students watch them again just before an exam.” So explains the professor, who has been working with open access software for a while now.
Although Van Dijk doesn't think the number of his listeners will explode, he only sees advantages in joining iTunes U. “Our discipline, water management, is very internationally oriented”, he says. “Making our lectures more accessible is good PR. It may attract students and it can attract attention from water companies who want to collaborate with us. And what's more, it doesn't cost us any more energy. We just do it and then wait and see what will happen. I think it's fun.”
TU Delft and the Open University are the first universities in the Netherlands to make their lectures freely available via iTunes U. The move puts the two universities in league with other internationally renowned institutions, like Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, UC Berkeley and MIT, which also publish there.
About eighty lectures on water management are now accessible on iTunes U. “They had been streamed on internet before on Collegerama [the TU platform for online lectures and symposia, ed.]”, Rob Speekenbrink, of TU Delft's marketing and communication department, explains.
An important difference between Collegerama and iTunes U is that the former streams the lectures, so in order to see them you need to be online all the time, whereas with iTunes U, you can now download lectures as podcasts and watch them whenever you want on your iPod or laptop. You can also subscribe to a stream, so that iTunes will automatically download the lectures.
Speekenbrink hopes that teachers throughout the university will embrace iTunes U. “Many teachers are not convinced that by making their lectures freely accessible their lectures will improve in quality”, he says. “I think they will become better, because experts around the world can comment on them. I guess many teachers aren't very familiar with this new phenomenon. And maybe they find it scary.”
Something that might be a bit scary as well is that once podcasted, a lecture is out in the open. If it is streamed, however, teachers can easily remove it from the internet. And then there is the problem of copyright. Speekenbrink: “Teachers often use images in PowerPoint presentations that can't be distributed freely because of copyrights. That can be problematic for podcasts.”
And last but not least: isn't it a shame that if you want to access a podcast on something other than a computer, the easiest way to do this is by using a device from Apple – an iPhone or an iPod (or in the near future an iPad)? “We don't want to depend on one brand”, Speekenbrink replies. “We hope that other multimedia portals will be developed so that you can also watch the lectures on the Google Android and other smart phones that are not iPhones.”