Dental Students Launch
iTunes U Initiative

Profiles in Success: School of Dentistry, University of Michigan

Ear Buds Blooming on Campus

Now, the three biggest lecture halls in the School of Dentistry are equipped with recording equipment. Students have taken charge of recording lectures, and making them available to their peers. Johnson says that the placement of an eMac in each hall ensures that the process is easy and extremely cost-effective.

“Students simply launch a script on the eMac that says ‘start recording,’ and at the end of the class they use the ‘stop recording’ prompt,” explains Johnson. “Then they add a little metadata about the lecture and the faculty member, and press ‘post.’ The content is then converted to both MP3 and AAC files and uploaded to the iTunes server. In less than five minutes it’s up on our iTunes U site. Also, the School’s class officers arrange for the students who are responsible for the recordings. Students grab the audio out of the public address system, which accepts any microphone input. Our faculty and staff are completely removed from the process.”

These days, says Johnson, first- and second-year dental students are rarely without an iPod or other playback device, no matter where they happen to be. “In the Rec Center students always have their headphones on, except they’re not necessarily listening to music — often they’re reviewing lessons in microbiology, chemistry, or craniofacial biology,” Johnson notes. “If they have an hour’s drive to and from campus, they’re reviewing their lectures. Our students have come to think of iTunes U as a really great time management tool.”

Intellectual Property Protected

While the specter of distributing lectures digitally has raised some questions about compromising intellectual property, Johnson says that UM has implemented a secure authorization and authentication process. This ensures that access to the lectures is restricted to dental students only. However, more and more faculty members are realizing that the use of iTunes U is the logical “next generation” in digital delivery.

“When faculty members worry that their intellectual property won’t be protected, I ask, ‘What’s the difference between making a PowerPoint presentation available to your students, and giving them an audio recording of your lecture?’ iTunes U offers another great way to disseminate information to students. Naturally, students have to get each professor’s permission to record a lecture. But no faculty member has ever said ‘no.’”

As of the end of the fall 2005 semester, UM dental students had recorded and archived over 300 lectures. Since students now have the ability to subscribe to the iTunes U site, any new content is automatically downloaded each time they log onto their computer. And, thanks to the cross-platform support in iTunes U, students are free to download the lectures to either a Mac or Windows-based PC.

Next Page: Researching the Benefits