Stanford Classes Now Available on iTunes

Chowser writes "Forbes is reporting Stanford University is now offering a wide range of content on iTunes. From the article: 'In an unprecedented move, Stanford University is collaborating with Apple Computer to allow public access a wide range of lectures, speeches, debates and other university content through iTunes. No need to pay the $31,200 tuition. No need to live on campus. No need even to be a student. The nearly 500 tracks that constitute "Stanford on iTunes" are available to anyone willing to spend the few minutes it takes to download them from the Internet.'" Talaper noted the Official Apple Page on the program is up as well.

cheap degrees @ home

99 cents per lecture, get your ONLINE degree from iTunes today

Free as in beer?

By the sounds of it, they will be free as in beer and speech. The big notch universities tend to set information free like that for the public.

Re:Free as in beer?

yup, free like MIT free: opencourseware [mit.edu] Actually, it is really great. Some of the MIT courses have videos of the lectures. Have a look at the video lectures in Professor Lewin's Physics I course of 1999--pretty entertaining stuff!

Re:cheap degrees @ home

99 cents per lecture, get your ONLINE degree from iTunes today

Not quite. The downside is these are a on-sided, read only participation of the material, which in my experience isn't quite as good as having it followed by a good old fashion Q & A session.

Also, the sheepskin from Stanford comes only with that Tuition deal. I don't think you'd get very far trying to set up your own school with them either, i.e. Bob University (based upon actual Stanford materials, but with our EZ-Pass exams!)

Re:cheap degrees @ home

based upon actual Stanford materials, but with our EZ-Pass exams!

Hey, you can get the real exams too! You just need to get access to a fraternity/sorority's word file...

"No need to be a student" is overstating it

Of the 500 available tracks, only 39 are lectures. The rest are sports, music, and random "Heard on campus" tracks that look like a blog. The available lectures look pretty cool though.

Re:"No need to be a student" is overstating it

I'm pretty sure the meant, no need to be a student to download the tracks. Not: No need to be a student because you can get your education through iTunes.

MIT OpenCourseWare

Glad to see other universities are following the trend set by MIT with their OpenCourseWare [mit.edu] project. It's interesting to see universities have faith that putting this content out for public consumption will not detract from their mission.

Without the diploma...

Without the piece of paper, the education is meaningless :)

Definitely won't detract

Making the content available is all positive for these universities. If I downloaded everything they made, and studied it thoroughly, I might have a strong grasp of the subject matter but I still wouldn't have a degree from MIT or Stanford. In the end there's value in the degree because it certifies your knowledge. If you go for a job interview, etc, and say I downloaded Stanford's coursework from ITunes, I rather doubt they'd consider me on par with a Stanfor graduate.

It's a good thing for them because it builds their image. It shows an interest in promotion education in general and sharing knowledge with those who cannot afford the $30K+. It also gives prospective students a chance to see what that money would be going for before they shell it out. So really all around a good thing for them.

Finishing touch

If I downloaded everything they made, and studied it thoroughly, I might have a strong grasp of the subject matter but I still wouldn't have a degree from MIT or Stanford.

...until shortly after you downloaded Photoshop.

Re:MIT OpenCourseWare

I think the Universities understand that employers don't generally have the cognitive skills to understand whether an applicants is qualified for a particular job and must really on earned degrees from institutions to tell them if they should or in some cases even can hire somebody. With this idea so entrenched in our corporate culture the University need not fear giving away their content because that isn't what is actually valuable in the market--the degree is. A person who gets a degree from Stanford but retains no learning will have a much easier time getting a well-paid job than a person without the degree who nevertheless memorized and internalized every bit of information Stanford gives away.

This is impressive

Also consider that Stanford is a private university, not public.

Meanwhile the Vatican is defending copyrighting the Pope's pronouncements. Which, IMHO, is right up there with copyright of MLK's 'I Have A Dream' and Co$'s copyrighted "Trade Secrets"

Nice move ya floppy tree :-)

University of Wisconsin, others also

First of all, this has been around at Stanford since October 2005. This was covered at Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] a month and a half ago (including the Stanford on iTunes [stanford.edu] site and store [apple.com]).

Second, this is also available at the University of Wisconsin - Madison [wisc.edu], as well as other schools, such as UC Berkeley [berkeley.edu].

What's actually "new" here is that Apple has productized this service for educational institutions in the form of iTunes U [apple.com], announced yesterday.

Though those who haven't heard of it before may be interested in Steve Jobs' 2005 commencement address at Stanford [apple.com].

Please note that iTunes U operates on a different server (deimos.apple.com) than the normal music store (phobos.apple.com).

Now you tell me

I already *paid* the $31,200 tuition you insensitive clod!

Harvard Extension

Harvard Extension, the night school at Harvard University, is experimenting with podcasting [podcastingnews.com] too. While a much smaller project, I look forward to a future where I can download official audio from classes that I missed due to illness or work schedule conflicts. And kudos to Stanford for opening up access to education and knowledge to the public.

Re:Harvard Extension

classes that I missed due to illness or work schedule conflicts

You misspelled "hangovers" and "parties"

Commoditizing teachers

My experience in college has been that a teacher spends most of his/her time helping a relatively small minority of a class. So it would seem reasonable that the rest of the students could learn as much, or more, in a class using pre-recorded lectures over the internet.

I would like to see this lead to a fairly nice public education model where online universities that are publicly subsidized allow students to take classes for free, and then the student pays for the teacher's time when he/she needs that extra help.

I listened to some this morning

This cropped up on macrumors.com last night, and I took the opportunity to grab the music tracks and a few lectures. I listened to "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" this morning - can thoroughly recommend it. I chose it purely based on the title, it turns out to be a lecture on the physiological nature of stress and was very interesting.

The music? Well...I liked it, but sorry Stanford - it's mostly very derivative and most bands seem to be directly pretending to be another cmmercial one. What happened to colleges doing new forms of music and experimental stuff?

Cheers,
Ian

"Now, as you can see in this equation"

Audio-only lectures are kind of pointless for most interesting content.

A good project: develop an open-source way to transmit and store presentations in a useful and navigatable form. Lectures need three streams - the audio, the presenter's face, and the graphics. The graphics need to be at much higher resolution, and should be sent as clean still images when possible. One output should be a web page, with thumbnails for the graphics and clickable audio segments. Then you can find something in the lecture when you need it.

The presentation should be run through a voice recognition system, to make the voice searchable. It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough for search. Similarly, OCR the graphics and pull keywords from them.

I'm reminded of Good Will Hunting

"You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library."

Stanford on iTunes

There is no single class lecture on iTunes on Stanford's page. The faculty lectures are public-access lectures that have been recorded (audio-only) on campus and contain no class information. The "Heard on Campus" part is a bunch of PR material that has shown up on iTunes, including speeches by famous people (Steve Jobs, the Dalai Lama, etc.) and Stanford presidential speeches for all of you into that kinda thing. The entire presentation is a massive PR stunt between Apple and Stanford U. So, you can take the hype and chuck that as well...

And as for the free content for UC Berkeley courses, we have only 100-level (or lower) classes which are basically prerequisites for a UC Berkeley education. I'm sorry to say that if you were looking for course content, you'll need to look elsewhere.

So this leaves MIT, which actually does have a lot of content (although it depends on what is put up by the professor), like this page [mit.edu] if you are interested in Computer Language Engineering (upper-level, apparently).

Law School Courses Available

This is a shameless plug, but it's on-topic.

I've been recreating my law school lectures at the University of Cincinnati (where I am a first-year student focusing on copyright and technology law). Instead of recording the raw lecture audio, and dealing with the copyright and privacy concerns, I've been taking detailed notes, adding my own analysis, and capturing new creative expression. (Yes there are still some copyright issues, but my lawyer and I are in agreement that what I am doing does fall under Fair Use.) This new creative expression is then placed under CC-Attribution and the GNU FDL so others can do new and innovative things with it.

I recorded roughly one 15-20 minute episode per lecture, with about 40 lectures in each of my four substantive classes.

My episodes are available for manual download and in podcast format through the iTunes Music Store (search for "Life of a Law Student"). This semester I have recruited some additional students to come on board. This way we can expand to other law schools and to undergraduate law / political science courses.

Here is the site [lifeofalawstudent.com], and I am still looking for students to help. Additionally, if you have technology skills (this is Slashdot after all), I need volunteers as we revamp our back-end software and deal with an influx of new material.

Contact me [lifeofalawstudent.com] if you are interested in being a part of this.

- Neil Wehneman

P.S. For those who are wondering if my "re-lectures" are credible, I scored a 3.77 GPA last semester. Although I don't get my class rank for a few more days, I've been told by the administration that this should land me in the top 10% of the class.

Re:good deal

Good deal.

Sounds like a great idea!

Sounds like a nice counterpart to MIT's OpenCourseWare.

Unfortunately not... MIT's OpenCourseWare [mit.edu] is well... Open.

Stanford on iTunes however requires an expensive piece of software (OS X or Windows) to use it.

I don't have a Mac, I don't run Windows - how am I supposed to access this?

I guess this what you can expect from a University that puts a 1 page FAQ [stanford.edu] in a PDF (why dear god, why?)

Good for some people I acknowledge, but no OpenCourseWare.

Re:Pretty Useless

Yes, clearly. Knowledge (especially free knowledge) is always a bad idea to arm the masses with. Allowing persons very interested in a particular subject access to informtion from a highly-esteemed university in spite of [perhaps] barriers that may have prevented them from attending that university (or any university at all) is indeed "pretty useless".
The commoditization of education as your (+3 Informative!) comment implies is one of the larger factors [in my opinion] in the steady decline of the US as a knowledge leader.