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Stanford Classes Now Available on iTunes

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Jan 25, 2006 12:28 PM
from the all-about-that-piece-of-paper dept.
Businesses Education Apple
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.
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[+] News: Expensive Books Inspire P2P Textbook Downloads 511 comments
jyosim writes "A site called Textbook Torrents is among the many sites popping up offering free downloads of expensive textbooks using BitTorrent or other peer-to-peer networks. With the average cost of textbooks going up every year, and with some books costing more than $100, some experts say that piracy will only increase." Having just completed graduate school, I can attest that quite a few books are in that more-than-$100 range, and that they're heavy besides. But the big-name textbook publishers are much less interested than I am in open textbooks, even if MIT has demonstrated that open courseware is feasible, and Stanford and other schools have put quite a bit of material on iTunes.
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  • cheap degrees @ home (Score:5, Funny)

    by hardticket (696737) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:30PM (#14559400)
    99 cents per lecture, get your ONLINE degree from iTunes today

    • Free as in beer? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ModernGeek (601932) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:32PM (#14559428) Homepage
      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:cheap degrees @ home (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ackthpt (218170) * on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:35PM (#14559479) Homepage Journal

      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!)

  • "No need to be a student" is overstating it (Score:5, Informative)

    by SoCalChris (573049) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:32PM (#14559425) Homepage Journal
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mzwaterski (802371) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:51PM (#14559699)
      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.

    • Huh? (Score:3, Funny)

      by jd (1658)
      39 lectures to 461 random tunes/gossip... Sounds about the ratio most students go for. If anything, it might be a little heavy on the course material.


      (I don't think anybody was seriously looking at iTunes as a rival to the UK's Open University program, where they've been doing remote broadcasts of lectures for a long time now.)

  • MIT OpenCourseWare (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mysqlrocks (783488) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:32PM (#14559426) Homepage Journal
    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... (Score:5, Funny)

      by everphilski (877346) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:35PM (#14559481) Journal
      Without the piece of paper, the education is meaningless :)
      • Without the piece of paper, the education is meaningless :)

        No, it just means the education is what you make of it. While you don't have "proof" of your understanding of the concepts you can leverage the information on a personal level. (eg Steve Jobs "dropping in" to calligraphy class)
        • Statements like that are why the education system in many Western countries is in such a state.

          Holy generalizations. And bad ones at that. (a state of what?)

          No longer do people pursue degrees for the love of the subject, they just want a nice piece of paper to wave in front of possible employers.

          The point of college *is* to make yourself more employable.

          It's a shame that for many personal achievement is now a distant second to what other people think of the letters after your name.

          I'm proud of

    • Definitely won't detract (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sterno (16320) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:37PM (#14559506) Homepage
      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 (Score:5, Funny)

        by wombatmobile (623057) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @01:02PM (#14559839)

        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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mrs. Grundy (680212) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:40PM (#14559545) Homepage
      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.
          • Depends, if you have a masters (or even BS) from Stanford in EE or CS with a very good GPA then I bow down before your study skills. Why? Because I see what the people who get those grades are like and how much they need to study. Just because your college or field is easy doesn't mean all are.

  • This is impressive (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ackthpt (218170) * on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:32PM (#14559431) Homepage Journal

    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 :-)

    • Re:This is impressive (Score:5, Funny)

      by Dhalka226 (559740) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @01:54PM (#14560501)
      Meanwhile the Vatican is defending copyrighting the Pope's pronouncements.

      Bah! Who needs the Pope. If god wants to talk to me, he'll send a flaming shrubbery. A nice one. But not too expensive.

    • Holy DRM, Batman! (Score:5, Funny)

      by EnsilZah (575600) <EnsilZah&Gmail,com> on Wednesday January 25 2006, @02:20PM (#14560796) Homepage
      When you think of it, DRM is not so incompatible with the bible.
      The whole tree of knowledge debacle was all about this.

      God is all like "No distribution of my IP".
      Then the Snake is all like "I haves the 0-day".
      And then Eve is all like "Adam, dude, here's a torrent".
      Adam to Eve "No way, God will totally rootkit our ass".
      Eve back to Adam "Chillax, guy".
      Then Adam is like "K".
      And God totally kickbans them from the server.

  • University of Wisconsin, others also (Score:5, Informative)

    by daveschroeder (516195) * on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:33PM (#14559439)
    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).
    • Please note that iTunes U operates on a different server (deimos.apple.com) than the normal music store (phobos.apple.com).

      Demios and Phobos are the moons of Mars (Terror and Fear, respectively)
    • The article in the Chronicle of Higher Education [chronicle.com] notes the six schools involved:

      Over the past year, Apple has worked with six institutions to test the service: Brown, Duke, and Stanford Universities; the University of Michigan School of Dentistry, at Ann Arbor; the University of Missouri School of Journalism, at Columbia; and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

      Universities also have the option of integrating the with local directory and authentication systems, requiring users to authenticate before use.

  • Now you tell me (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:33PM (#14559440)
    I already *paid* the $31,200 tuition you insensitive clod!

  • Harvard Extension (Score:5, Informative)

    by maynard (3337) <.j.maynard.gelinas. .at. .gmail.com.> on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:35PM (#14559471) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Commoditizing teachers (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nharmon (97591) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:36PM (#14559496) Homepage
    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.
  • Man, when I first read the headline, I thought they were teaching about iTunes. That would be a popular class.

  • I listened to some this morning (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mccalli (323026) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:41PM (#14559565) Homepage
    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" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Animats (122034) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:49PM (#14559675) Homepage
    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.

  • Further proof (Score:2, Insightful)

    by guisar (69737)
    Education and knowledge seem to have no value- it's only the degree and the name at the top of the certificate which has any currency...
  • "Stanford on iTunes" are available to anyone willing to spend the few minutes it takes to download them from the Internet.'"

    Text books extra?

  • I'm reminded of Good Will Hunting (Score:5, Funny)

    by rtphokie (518490) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:58PM (#14559779)
    "You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library."

  • Even Easier (Score:3, Informative)

    by ranton (36917) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @01:06PM (#14559906)
    I like that Universities may now make it even easier to learn on your own instead of wasting your time in school. I routinely go to course websites at MIT, University of Illinois (I live in the state), and other colleges to basically take the classes along with the students.

    They usually have quizes and homework posted along with solutions, and rarely have any passwords to get the information. I also can sometimes download blackboard screenshots, lecture notes, and even recordings of lectures. Sure beats sitting in class. And since I already run a company I dont need a peice of paper that says I am smart, so there is no need to go to college again.

    I guess if I ever decided to do some kind of research I could go back to college and actually finish this time, but I am in no hurry.
    --

  • Once in a while you can get shown the light (Score:3, Funny)

    by digitaldc (879047) * on Wednesday January 25 2006, @01:07PM (#14559915)
    No need to pay the $31,200 tuition. No need to live on campus. No need even to be a student.

    Funny, that's exactly the way I felt about college when I went on tour with the Grateful Dead.

  • You pay for credentials, not education (Score:3, Insightful)

    by squarooticus (5092) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @01:15PM (#14560027) Homepage
    While you can get a good education at almost any college, and be forced to get one to a greater or lesser degree depending on how rigorous the curriculum is, the tuition pays for the credential: a Bachelor of Science from Stanford means a lot more to potential employers than "I listened to all the lectures and did all the problem sets required for a Stanford degree. No really, I did!"

  • Stanford on iTunes (Score:5, Informative)

    by dantheman82 (765429) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @01:23PM (#14560133) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Landaras (159892) <neil@wehnemaQUOTEn.com minus punct> on Wednesday January 25 2006, @01:29PM (#14560218) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tpgp (48001) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @12:52PM (#14559718) Homepage
      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:good deal (Score:3, Interesting)

        by d_jedi (773213)
        RealPlayer, required to listen/watch any of the lectures, is not open.. and is much more offensive/intrusive/etc. than OSX or Windows.

        Add that you can only stream most (all?) of the content and not download it.. well, it sort of limits the usefulness, doesn't it?
      • Does this [nanocrew.net] work?
    • To the extent that a large part of classwork in school (from high school through college) is essentially a one-way lecture, I think this is a geat idea. For example, instead of a High School English teacher giving the same 30 min lecture to 5 different groups of kids, with 20 min left for questions, let all the kids watch a recording of the lecture, which they can "rewind" to catch things they would have otherwise missed. That means the teacher can spend his/her time in smaller groups helping with problems

    • Re:Pretty Useless (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Marc2k (221814) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @01:01PM (#14559836) Homepage Journal
      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.
        • You presume he learns better from reading than listening. Some people learn better hands-on. Some require a mix. One learning method isn't perfect for everyone.

    • Re:Pretty Useless (Score:4, Insightful)

      by shotfeel (235240) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @01:03PM (#14559869)
      That takes a very limited definition of "value". I think you underestimate the number of people who would (informally) like to learn more. This provides a much easier avenue for doing just that. For some people, the line "learning is a lifelong experience" isn't just a line.

    • Re:a solution to a problem that doesn't exist (Score:4, Insightful)

      by javaxman (705658) on Wednesday January 25 2006, @01:27PM (#14560195) Journal
      The only reason I can think why they would want to do this is if they are getting a bunch of $$$ from apple somehow

      Well, these are hosted on Apple's domain. So Stanford isn't storing the content or paying for the bandwidth.

      this is almost forcing college kids to go out and buy apple compliant hardware if implemented on a mass scale

      How so ? You can access the iTMS from a Windows PC or an Apple PC and I'm pretty sure there are hacks to get at it from Linux, though those are unsupported... what hardware do you have to buy ? You don't need an iPod to listen to these, and they're easily transcoded into MP3s; they aren't copy-protected, and you could transcode them even if they were FairPlay DRM'd.

      Why not just have directories of MP3s ? There's a fine question. I think the answer is probably because Apple is offering this service for free, and most users will find it easier to use than a directory of MP3s. It's great, serious, sneaky hardcore marketing, but you're making it out to be evil... which I'm not sure it is.

      I feel like I just responded to a troll... is the lack of Linux/Unix iTMS client support what's bugging you about this? Because I think that's probably the only justifiable complaint a person could have- otherwise, this is very, very cool.

    • College is the quickest way to acquire the skills necessary to learn any other job. If you knew many 18 year olds, you would know that most of them are clueless, they need specific understanding of core concepts if they plan to go on to a successful career.

      An example: Computer Science. Sure you can teach yourself to program, nothing terribly difficult about programming. In fact many of us were doing it as soon as we could reach a keyboard. This however does not teach you other concepts. What a state machine

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