USF Campus Gets In ‘Tune’

Posted Nov 16, 2006 by Suzanne Schmidt

Updated Nov 16, 2006 at 11:47 AM

iTUNES WILL ARRIVE BEFORE YEAR’S END

By SUZANNE M. SCHMIDT
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The University of South Florida has signed an agreement with Apple Computers Inc. to make iTunes U available to students later this fall.
The Web site will allow students and faculty to post MP3 and M4A audio files, video files and PDF or Word documents. Through the iTunes program, people can buy music, movies, television shows, audio books and download free podcasts.
“The free hosted service gives students easy 24-hour-a-day access to educational content,” said Kathleen Moore, associate vice president for academic affairs and educational outreach. “The service will enhance the Blackboard learning management system and other high-tech teaching and learning initiatives already in place at USF.”
Neil Gomes, project manager, instructional designer and Web master at USF, said iTunes will be a valuable learning tool. The program will be available first to the USF Health and the USF College of Education. If the implementation goes well, it will go schoolwide.
“There are a lot of very positive instructional uses,” Gomes said. “Students can log on and look at a specific course. Teachers can post audio files of pieces of lectures or panel discussions.”
The free service would be downloaded to most of the computers in the computer labs on campus.
USF officials evaluated whether or not to go with iTunes U by looking to schools such as the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University.
“The site works as a push vs. pull format,” Gomes said. “It is a site you subscribe to like a magazine. Students can go to a specific podcast and subscribe to it. They can check the files they want and then the program will automatically download anything new in that particular podcast. Students can download the information to a MP3 player or just listen to it on a computer.”
Not only will iTunes U provide access to audio files, students will be able to create their own blogs or online journals as well.
“People can post to an online journal,” Gomes said. “Then other people can comment. It can be used as a discussion board. Students and faculty could upload MP3 files or make podcasts automatically and then send it to anyone who wants to subscribe to the blog.”
“The new Web site will add lots of space,” Gomes said. “The USF Health and the USF College of Education will each get 500 gigabytes of space to use for whatever.”
There are many different uses the new Web site will provide including downloading lectures, interviews, music and sports.
“For instance, if a faculty member in the visual and performance arts wants to go to a museum,” Gomes said. “The teacher could take a voice recorder and go to a specific painting and discuss it or give their students an audio tour of the museum. Then the student could download the audio file into an MP3 player and go through the museum on their own time while listening to their teacher gives them the tour.”
With the possibility of downloading video, the faculty could even take pictures or video and the student could take a virtual tour without ever leaving the computer lab, Gomes said.
For more information, visit http://www.usf.edu.

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