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.

MIT OpenCourseWare

[mysqlrocks]

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.

This is impressive

[ackthpt]

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:cheap degrees @ home

[ackthpt]

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!)

Commoditizing teachers

[nharmon]

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.

Definitely won't detract

[sterno]

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.

Non iTunes Availability?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a great and an idea I would definately invest time and money in. Had it non been on iTunes only. Way to alienate those of us who refuse to own the trendy, overpriced iPod and/or use their iTunes software.

C'mon Stanford, get with the program and offer this at different outlets. Again, something i'd love to pay for, but because of it not being in a widespread distribution method, i'll just download it free.

I listened to some this morning

[mccalli]

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

Re:good deal

[tpgp]

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:Non iTunes Availability?

[Anonymous Coward]

itunes is not a widespread distribution method? Dude, I understand you have principles but now you're just acting like an idiot.

Re:Non iTunes Availability?

[shotfeel]

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 and answering questions.

Some of my most frustrating times in classes were when I couldn't keep up with taking notes and trying to understand the lecture at the same time. A "pause" button sure would have been helpful.

Re:Pretty Useless

[Happy Lemming]

You can learn from canned lectures. I'm not interested in university credits - I have quite enough already - but I do like to learn things now and then. Recorded lectures are good for that.

So are "Ideas" on CBC Radio 2 & alt.binaries.sounds.radio.misc

Available in Europe?

[GekkePrutser]

Is this available in Europe too? Or will we be excluded again like with every other cool content on iTunes Music Store (none of the TV series are available in Europe :(

Re:Without the diploma...

[ZombieWomble]

Statements like that are why the education system in many Western countries is in such a state. 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. 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 know, for myself at least, that those notes often provide additional insight or alternate approaches to material I've studied, and are helpful when you want to grab a quick bit of information on something but don't want to have to hunt down the text books, dig them out of the library, and hope they actually cover what they claim to in the way you need it. But hey, that's just me.

Law School Courses Available

[Landaras]

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.

Creative Commons Lectures

[Marxiavelli]

Its good to see Stanford opening up there knowledge base to the public. I'm working on a project that is a little more accessible than that. http://www.globalizationstudies.org/ [globalizationstudies.org] The lectures are available as high quality h264 on itunes and on the website for free with a creative commons license. Link to itunes. http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/ viewPodcast?id=118462187&s=143455 [apple.com] The classes are broadcast live too. Class #3 starts tonight at 6pm MST and runs for 3 hours.

Six schools in total at rollout

[daveschroeder]

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. This way, content can be restricted only to people affiliated with the university, students taking a particular class, or the general public.

During the test phase, this project was codenamed "Indigo". The service also features tools for easily creating, aggregating, and deploying content to the iTunes "store" for each school. It's a very attractive service because it takes advantage of a service many students are already familiar with (iTunes and iPod), uses an emerging technology that is perfect for continuously updated audio or video broadcasts on a topic (podcasting), and makes it easy for participating institutions to publish their content without having to build a service themselves or maintain infrastructure.

Re:Learning and Education

[John Courtland]

Reading is one way communication. Is it, therefore, stupid? I fail to see how your argument is valid.

Re:Learning and Education

[everphilski]

It is stupid to take a lecture and strip away the interactivity, yes.

It is stupid to take an interactive medium and remove the ability to communicate back. Its like making telephones with only an earpiece.

Re:Harvard Extension

[maynard]

Nice troll. However, just to inject some facts on the issue, Harvard Extension [harvard.edu] is one of twelve degree granting schools at Harvard University. Classes are taught by both tenured and untenured Harvard professors and visiting faculty. Students who receive good marks may also attend regular day Harvard classes. The Extension school has an excellent reputation, can you offer any facts to refute this?

Re:good deal

[posterlogo]

Really? They should have the ~0.1% in mind who have zero access to mac or windows computers? This is what you complain about? Seriously?

I applaud Stanford's effort. It is not easy to come up with a mass distribution scheme that will be easily accessible to the vast majority of people. I'm sure MIT's program is great but this is the first I've heard of it. With Stanford's programs on iTunes, I would bet they would be far more accessible to the broader public.

I'm all for open source, stick it to the man, down with establishment etc., but gimme a break if you think Linux is easy for just anybody. Let's focus on the spirit of TFA, not the usual politics of Linux elitism.

Re:good deal

[d_jedi]

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?