UC Berkeley on iTunes U Galvanizes Campus

Profiles in Success: University of California, Berkeley

Berkeley, CA — Since its founding in the 1860s, the University of California, Berkeley has been guided by its motto, “Fiat Lux” (“Let there be light”). The university has established a renowned tradition of openness, encouraging innovation and exploration among its faculty and students. Now, Berkeley has extended that openness still further by making educational audio and video content available to students and the public via UC Berkeley on iTunes U. Thanks to its branded iTunes U website, the university is sharing its “light” with the world.

The launch of UC Berkeley on iTunes U was the “next step” in the university’s digital evSolution. Select courses and events had been webcast since 2001. Then Obadiah Greenberg started hearing about podcasting.

“When I first heard about it, I knew there was a direct relationship to what we were doing,” says Greenberg, former product manager for webcast.berkeley, UC Berkeley’s webcast and podcast site. “I felt that audio-only would suffice for much of our content, and the file sizes would be much smaller and easier to manage. Plus, the portability of podcasts, the ability to download content and move it onto a portable media player, would be huge. And I loved the idea that people could subscribe, and have the content automatically delivered to them.”

Podcasting Makes Strange Bedfellows

By late 2005, Greenberg and his colleagues extended Berkeley’s automated webcasting application to include audio podcasts. At the same time, Greenberg was keeping close tabs on the types of content flowing into the iTunes Store’s podcasting site, and sensed that the site would be an ideal distribution system for digital content. Then Berkeley’s athletic archrival — Stanford University — launched a branded iTunes U site. But Stanford actually proved to be Berkeley’s biggest ally in the rollout of UC Berkeley on iTunes U.

Says Greenberg, “I watched as musical artists and labels who had delivered a lot of content feeds to the iTunes Store via podcasts were getting their own branded pages. I remember thinking, ‘It would be a dream come true to get a Berkeley-branded education page!’ And then Stanford on iTunes U launched, and we all looked at it and thought, ‘What is this? This is something new.’ So we called our friends at Stanford, and went down and learned about iTunes U.”

Stanford Team Shares Its Secrets

Greenberg met with Dr. Victoria Szabo, who at the time was Stanford’s academic technology manager in the Office of the Provost for Undergraduate Education. For Greenberg, collaborating with Szabo and her team was a pleasure.

“They were incredibly generous with their time,” says Greenberg. “They did a full demo, they told us all about the administrative side, and we learned a ton. Then I contacted Apple, told them that we were doing all of these courses and special events, and that we had access to all of these rich digital archives. We met with them soon after, and had some fantastic discussions.”

Next Page: University-Branded Site an Immediate Hit