Get Herald RSSIn cyberspace, you can learn to cook lemon chicken and become a belly-dancing star in less than 10 minutes. But you never expected your professor to be an online sensation.
Now, anyone with internet access can learn about pendulums by watching Professor Walter H.G. Lewin swing on a rope in a classroom at M.I.T. or sit in bed to contemplate the philosophy of mortality with Professor Shelly Kagan of Yale.
In collaboration with Apple, many universities have been opening up their courses to the online public to make content ranging from special lectures to classes free to download through a new feature on their iTunes store - iTunes U.
Since the launch of iTunes U on May 30, 2007, over 100 universities like M.I.T., the University of California, Davis, Boston University, Stanford and Yale have contracted with Apple to put various types of university content online. According to Apple's Web site, iTunes U users can "easily search, download, and play course content just like they do music, movies, and TV shows." iTunes U also allows prospective students to explore the universities, current students to stay engaged on-the-go and alumni to stay connected to their alma maters.
Each institution uses iTunes U differently, tailoring it to its needs and goals. M.I.T. provides a selection of recorded public events and symposia, lectures, historical documents and other media created by the M.I.T. community. Yale mainly provides audio for public events focusing on specific conferences held on campus.
Other universities like Michigan Technological University use iTunes U to provide supplementary materials for specific courses through podcasts or videos.
According to Stanford Provost John Etchemendy, in the original online press release of iTunes U in 2007, "(Stanford's) partnership with Apple and iTunes U provides a creative and innovative way to engage millions of people with our teaching, learning and research and share the experience of intellectual exploration and discovery that defines our university."
Knowledge 'deserves to be free'
But certain universities have been looking for alternative ways to make academic content online long before iTunes U. Initially, the "Open Educational Resources" movement was spearheaded by M.I.T. There, the OpenCourseWare program began in 2001 as an initiative for enhancing students' learning through technological resources, both on campus and from afar.
Within two years, the goals of OCW had transformed and the program was relaunched to publish materials from all M.I.T. courses for any Web user.
In 2005, OCW inaugurated the OCW Consortium, which now has more than 100 universities internationally that support open publication of materials in courses.
Many universities have been following the "Open Educational Resources" movement. Open Yale Courses, which was launched in the 2006-07 school year and is a program separate from Yale's use of iTunes U, features introductory courses from a wide palate of departments available to anyone with an internet connection. The initiative provides videos of lectures, sample exams, and audio and video supplementary materials.
Although Yale is not the first to deliver open courses online, Kagan said, "Yale decided to do it better than it has been done so far: high quality videos, the production value, cameramen who follow (the professors), all the supplementary materials online, recommended readings and audio." He added that open courses create new ways for current students to "shop" classes and for prospective students to compare universities.
On Oct. 16, OYC introduced eight new courses from various disciplines. Diana Kleiner, a Yale professor of art history and classics and OYC's principal investigator, handpicks a wide array of introductory courses in order to appeal to "the broadest interests of (the) widest variety of people across the world."
Stanford has also adopted OCW, claiming in its proposal for the initiative that "education should not discriminate," and that knowledge "is transformative" and "deserves to be free." The initiative "challenges the traditional approach to teaching in universities, with the potential to modernize education inside and outside the university," the proposal suggested.
Even Harvard Medical School has an Open Courseware Initiative offering courses like "Dementia, elder abuse, driving" in order "to exchange knowledge from the Harvard community of scholars to other academic institutions, prospective students, and the general public," according to the Harvard Medical School MyCourses Web site. The site notes that opening up its course content is in line with its "moral obligation to share this knowledge with other academic communities and the general public."
The challenges of access
But this digital movement of making college content broadly available online and through iTunes U can create some challenges, professors say. According to Kagan, during the OYC development, faculty and administrators questioned how open courses would affect enrollment.
"Would more people want to take the class because of the celebrity status on the web? Would fewer people take the class not to waste a credit because they can just take a laptop and watch? Would people take the class and then not show up?" said Kagan, recounting original concerns about online content initiatives. Enrollment for Kagan's philosophy course on death actually increased this year, but the enrollment during the year of recording was lower than years before.
"The potential downside is that students here might start skipping classes," astronomy professor Charles Bailyn of Yale wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. "That didn't seem to actually happen, at least in my case." Many professors using the program have only just started to do so this year, so the effects of OYC on enrollment are still unclear.
For OpenCourseWare, which was established earlier than Open Yale Courses and had already spread to other institutions, enrollment problems do not appear to be an issue. Both Kleiner and Kagan said the courses being digitalized are very popular courses, with or without such Web sites. Kleiner emphasized that online content does not replace the educational experience of being an enrolled student in the course.
"Education remains a highly interpersonal undertaking," Kagan said. After dismissing the idea that future students will be learning only from computer screens, he said the online portion is an incomplete picture of education. Much of it has to do with the classroom experience: asking and answering questions, going to professors' office hours and the inter-student experience.
Other issues include copyrights, college credit-seekers and intellectual property rights. All the open course Web sites explicitly write that credit is not given to online participation in these courses. Intellectual property becomes an issue when the professors are interested later publishing on topics discussed in recorded lectures.
"The single biggest challenge is intellectual property," Kleiner said. "On the internet anyone in the world can access it, you can also download, and incorporate it into your own sources, but you have to cite, reuse and remix. It's no longer protected where you use only material belonging to you."
"I could imagine some of my colleagues had plans to turn their intro classes into textbooks," Kagan said. "If I had such inclinations for the class, it would have given me pause."
Will Brown open up?
Although Brown is not currently participating in iTunes U, according to Catherine Zabriskie, associate director of teaching and learning services at Computing and Information Services, the University is currently working with Apple "to provide the safest use of iTunes U content" and to provide public media space in iTunes for the faculty. Instead of providing open course content, certain groups at Brown like the Watson Institute for International Studies are interested in putting special events and lectures on iTunes U.
Zabriskie said that Brown has been making efforts "to create a way to make Brown content more accessible outside of Brown." According to Zabriskie, there has not been a demand from faculty and students to make courses open and available online.
CIS has been working with Apple to provide faculty with media space on iTunes for supplementary materials exclusively for students enrolled in their courses. Professor Dana Gooley, who teaches a course in the music department on opera, uses an iTunes interface called iTap to provide listening assignments for students in the course. It is an open framework where professors can put up different menu items and upload content. Previously, the Brown music department had a system called Brown Ears, an electronic audio reserve system where enrolled students could stream the sound files.
"(iTap) changed the way I teach because when I was a student, I had to go to the library and listen to cassette recordings. It was very hard to find the beginning of the track because the track would be forwarded to the middle of some track, and they would be labeled unclearly. So this ability to upload sound files is enormously helpful," Gooley said.
Since students spend less and less time in libraries, he said, "the ability of iTap to adapt to the way students tend to study today is totally positive."
About the idea of open online college content in other universities, Gooley said, "I have not seen this system in action. But I'm advising a graduate student who found 14 lectures, a series by a leading professor on Marx, at NYU. He said it was amazing and he learned so much. Educationally, it's a positive thing."
