Stanford on iTunes U: RevSolutionizing Curriculum and Communications

Profiles in Success: Stanford University

A Successful Test of Concept

In undergraduate courses at Stanford, faculty members often use digital resources to supplement their course materials. Such resources are particularly popular in a large lecture course, where the distribution of lecture notes and slides is a common way to reinforce learning. Before the iTunes U initiative, professors placed this content in Stanford’s course management system, linked to it on their personal websites, and referred students to library reserves for additional media content. This required students to go to multiple places to retrieve the necessary information - until the iTunes U initiative, no centralized repository of digital files existed.

“We picked the IntProduction to the Humanities for our pilot because the courses depend heavily on the lecture format, and because the idea of having recorded lectures available to the teaching team and students was extremely attractive to both,” notes Szabo. “iTunes U made it so much easier to access and manage course content than the other methods we’d used.

“After seeing the success of iTunes U in our Humanities courses, the initiative quickly spread to our music department and other programs,” Szabo adds. “Now faculty members in our drama, history, writing, and biomedicine departments are very interested in iTunes U.”

Effortless Content Access

After the course content has been organized in Stanford’s academic iTunes U site, students now log into the site using a secure authentication and authorization protocol in the university’s course management system (authorized administrators can upload and edit content via the system as well). With just a few clicks, students can find recorded lectures, music, and other content that supports their classes.

The content can then be downloaded to an iPod or a laptop for easy mobile learning, or to students’ desktop computers for study at home or in their dorms. Students also have the option of burning CDs of the content. From start to finish, Szabo says the process is almost effortless.

“We’ve been tracking usage on our alumni site for the past few months, and it’s been fairly intuitive,” she notes. “We’ve had upwards of 100,000 downloads, and we’ve received very few requests for help. And the academic site seems to be working out just as well. Our iTunes U initiative has gotten a lot of attention, yet needs very little support, which is a great combination.”

Next Page: iTunes Initiative Sparks Collaboration