About
The Open University on iTunes U project was an initiative of the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) and the division of Learning and Teaching Solutions (LTS).
In June 2008, the Open University launched a new channel in Apple’s University podcasting concept, iTunes U. This project supported the work on this channel and sought to move beyond it for current and new students.
Through 2007, North American Universities had been using Apple’s iTunes as a powerful platform to reach their students and the wider world. Then, on June 3, 2008, Apple finally invited some other countries into this exciting channel. The three European Universities to launch at that time were The Open University, University College London (in the UK), and Trinity, Dublin (Ireland). Each of us launched with a pretty decent selection of materials and podcasts. At launch, the OU had around 300 a/v elements from about 30 of its courses; no lectures, per se – we didn’t really do that sort of thing, you know! Instead, you could get useful video concepts from hot, currently running courses that you could use to understand the nature of the topic – from Globalisation in a case study of the US/Mexico border to computer control systems for milking organic cows! And, if you liked, you could click a link and sign right up for the full experience. Since the launch, we had been steadily adding elements from our courses – check out the ‘impact’ link above to see where we had got to.
So then, you could use your iPod, iPhone, or iTunes on your computer to quickly and easily synchronise with your OU course.
Launching the Open University on iTunes U in the iTunes application allowed users to have a look.
But this was just the start of a long process for us…
The iTunes U project was expected to bring a number of key innovations for the Open University through 2009 and 2010. And this website guided users into and through these.
Research
What were the channels we used to work with students all good for? Were there key differences between the public channels like Television, YouTube, iTunes, and the website channels we used? What about the ones that were more suited to interactivity and mobility?
There were already plenty of passive, broadcast channel routes out to students. You might have immediately thought of TV and Radio (both of which were well used by us here in the OU); but in a sense, a book was also pretty passive and a broad form of ‘cast.’ So, the “what were they good for” issue was a fairly generic question of pedagogy.
Related Research Projects
STEEPLE was the new JISC bid that we were running with Oxford and Cambridge. It worked on finding appropriate support systems within our universities for developing practices and procedures to support podcasting (and thereby iTunes U) developments. The Open University’s role focused on issues such as institutional practices for handling rights and clearance of materials and on designing for a new broadcast format. It was only a year long but brought together the three key universities to compare and blend our strengths.
iCoper was a new eContent+ EC initiative. This brought together many EC repositories into a common framework; our podcasting and iTunes framework was VERY interesting to our EC partners. We did quite a lot of boring work (IMS and things) but also worked on sharing our best practices (it was a “best practice network”).
Related OU Channels
Podcast.Open was KMi’s core back-end system for collecting and distributing podcast feeds. You could use it to consume podcast material, of course – but it was also there to give you a channel to produce them too. You could collect your thoughts into a series and syndicate them out to other channels, like iTunes, Miro, or YouTube.
YouTube for the Open University was a participatory video-sharing website where selected Open University video materials could be shared, discussed, and contributed to.
OpenLearn was the OU’s place in the Open Educational Resources movement. This meant that all the content you found on the site was made freely available to you under the Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 licence (UK: England & Wales). You were free to download, remix, and reuse it any way you wished as long as you stuck within the terms of the license. OpenLearn was also about a massive community of learners using some of the coolest web2 communication tools to connect and help each other. These tools were also available under open-source licenses, by the way!
Open2.Net was an interactive space that acted as the home of BBC/Open University TV and Radio programmes on the web.
Impact
These statistics related to the 2,002 days (286 weeks) since our launch into iTunes U on 3rd June 2008. In that time, we had:
- 65,138,000 downloads
- Over 9,015,700 visitors downloaded files
- Averaged *87,500 downloads a week
- 87.5% of visitors were from outside the United Kingdom (based on the last 180 days of traffic)
- 449 collections contained 3,485 tracks (1,638 audio, 1,847 video)
- 320 of the collections contained audiovisual material taken from 186 courses
- 129 of the collections contained non-course-specific material
- 98.1% of the tracks had transcripts (in PDF format)
- 423 OpenLearn study units were available as eBooks (ePub), representing over 5,000 hours of study
- 79 iTunes U Courses
- Delivered an average* of 0.3 TB of data a week, with a further estimate of 1-2 TB delivered via Akamai, based on historical data before the use of Akamai
* average based on last 4 weeks traffic
