Web Services Blog

Blogging from the iTunes u conference. Open university presentation today.

The open university doesn’t do lectures -lectures in print is done, but never traditional lectures.

For the last 10-12 years they’ve been using courses based around video and moodle.

The technologies they use are intended to reduce the legwork that’s required to get information about video into the video itself

Promotion and communication are vital to success. The staff are the key objective as we want generate more content. The staff can feel that they own this or are invested.

Search engine optimization is important as well because you need to be able to track and measure the impact. Its also important to know who your visitors are. You need to know who’s going in from where and how to determine where they go

Sustainability – moving from consumption to production – raising engagement with this type of material. Training is central to this, a storytelling program has been very successful as a means of getting people used to the idea of telling their own stories, and generating a sense of excitement.

That’s the first session complete. Thanks to apple for the loan of the iPad – its been interesting to see how it can be used and its not too hard to see the potential in it as you use it. Its not quite perfect but it does manage to get through basic tasks well.

Afternoon session begins – UCL and their use of iTunes U. Lessons learned: hold back some material. An ideal launch window is three months. You tend to wallow about otherwise. I disagree on this – we’ve been building infrastructure and getting good at the job of regular recording first. When we have a good model in place for this, we’ll seed iTunes u presence and then off to launch.

Timescales, make a plan, stick to it.

Public site manager: a tool for managing iTunes u collections and content. Web based and uses tags. Released rather recently, and shows a good deal of promise as a means of maintaining the public facing iTunes u presence.

And another break. The funny thing is that I’ve met more people from UK Colleges in Munich than I have in the UK. You can’t beat the benefits of a few hours of networking.

Afternoon sessions covered the iTunes U project management kit – very useful stuff. It esentially gets you started with the job of managing the deployment of an iTunes U site.  Their websiter is here: http://www.steeple.org.uk/wiki/Main_Page

Maclearning.org http://maclearning.org/ is also a useful resource.

Thats about it for today, interesting meeting, nice people, learned a lot.  Our basic launch of iTunes U should go well, and I’ve got a laundry list of ambitious add-ons we can look at as well. There’s very little stopping Guildford from being unique in the UK as a location for modern accessable online learning. Nottingham uni and the Open uni have shown us the way.