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.

"No need to be a student" is overstating it

[SoCalChris]

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.

Free as in beer?

[ModernGeek]

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.

University of Wisconsin, others also

[daveschroeder]

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).

Harvard Extension

[maynard]

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.

Little more education for you...

[everphilski]

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)

Even Easier

[ranton]

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.
--

Stanford on iTunes

[dantheman82]

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).

Re:Free as in beer?

[084883447]

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!

MP3 unavailability

[BarnabyWilde]

The FAQ says that MP3 formats are not (very, widely, ever, etc.) available.

That's the salient point the parent poster is making.

Re:Free as in beer?

[AVIDJockey]

There are some other good resources out there that stream lectures for free, such as the University of Washington [uwtv.org] (Check out the CSE Colloquia series and their medical programming) and ResearchChannel [researchchannel.org].

Re:good deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Jon Udell kindly managed to liberate these feeds. Check his del.icio.us links for the urls:

http://del.icio.us/judell/stanford+podcasting [del.icio.us]

iTunes on Linux...

[benjamindees]

Does this [nanocrew.net] work?

Re:"Now, as you can see in this equation"

[jdub_dub]

Have a look at MPEG-4/MPEG-7.

MPEG-4 has support for seperate streams of data, e.g. still images (high quality), text (monochrome), moving images (low quality), and so on.

MPEG-7 has support for metadata of streams, e.g. the keywords and lecture notes.

Some of these can be stored in XML too - so it is then a trivial process to convert them into a webpage (XSL etc).