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Leslie Carr wrote: > Does anyone have any experience with iTunes U? Our University is > thinking of starting a presence on Apple's iTunes U (the section of > the iTunes store that distributes podcasts and video podcasts from > higher education institutions). > > It looks very professional (see for example the OU's presence at http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/itunesu/ > ) and there are over 300 institutions who are represented there. > HOWEVER, I can't shake the feeling that this is a very bad idea, even > for lovers of Apple products. My main misgiving is that the content > isn't accessible apart from through the iTunes browser, and hence it > is not Googleable and hence it is pretty-much invisible. Why would > anyone want to do that? Isn't it a much better idea to put material on > YouTube and use the whole web/web2 infrastructure? Oxford does both using the same datafeed: an iTunesU presence (which is very popular in terms of downloads and as a success story within the institution); and a local, openly available site serving up the same content, <http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/>. iTunesU only processes an RSS feed (or equiv); the actual content remains hosted within the institution so it's quite simple to expose it within multiple locations. Mike -- Dr Michael Fraser Head of Infrastructure Systems and Services Oxford University Computing Services 13 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 6NN Tel: 01865 283 343 Fax: 01865 273 275 http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mikef/