Tuesday 2 November 2010

Welcome to SPIDER!

Welcome to SPIDER's first web (presence)! The SPIDER project is Sharing Practice with iTunes U Digital Educational Resources. The purpose of this project is to investigate and model and disseminate information about the development and release of educational resources through iTunes U by UK universities.

By most reckoning, iTunes U is not considered a proper repository of open educational resources (OER). However, it distributes many educational resources, for free, and technologically speaking, these resources can be repurposed if one knows how. It certainly has a place in the OER discussion.

What do you think? How close is iTunes U to being an OER repository?

4 comments:

  1. OK, just to get the discussion started and not posting anyone's policy.

    iTunesU is not relevent to the discussion of OER. It is a popular closed platform, which may be of interest to some in the dissemination of OER materials alongside a more open publication (OpenSpires is a good example of this).

    Publication of material on iTunesU does not constitute OER release, as it is not possible to access the material without signing on to iTunes.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You can get iTunesU material without being signed into an iTunes account, definitely. I just tried this -- I signed out of my account, clicked to iTunesU, downloaded and am now listening to and watching Introduction to Quantum Mechanics - James Binney of Oxford. I'm still signed out.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I still get a message that I have to install something called "iTunes" to get to this "OER". It doesn't run on my phone, and they don't let me install software on the PCs in the library. I don't understand this as I can get to normal OER just using a browser. Any tips?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Salling Media Sync brings iTunes material onto loads of phone models; you might have a look at that (http://www.salling.com/). You might consider mentioning to a student rep or tutor that iTunes could be a helpful software to have at the uni; it is free.

    ReplyDelete