iTunes University Gets Some New Competition

For several years many educational institutions , including Depaul, have contracted with Apple Inc. to use their online iTunes University to make educational audio and video content available online to their own users and sometimes also to the public. Very recently two new web locations have announced their intent to make the instructional content of many educational institutions, freely available on the World Wide Web.

The first comes out of work at the video mega-site  YouTube. It is a sub-site of YouTube which has been dubbed, YouTube EDU. Educational institutions had been posting a lot of content on their own to YouTube. What the new site does is aggregate this content , organize and make it  searchable  for users. The videos cover a broad range of topics such as full courses, lectures, cultural programs, research projects, campus tours, college news, sporting events. There are over 100 schools that have videos available through the site. Some have 10s of offerings while others have 100s. A school's videos can both serve as recruitment tools and help prospective students make more informed decisions about what schools to apply to.

A second new site called, Academic Earth, seems to be taking a more selective approach to presenting the video content of educational institutions. The developers state " At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers [ to achieving a world class education ] and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning." At present they offer selected full courses and lectures in 17 subject areas, from schools like Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Yale.

Both sites speak of democratizing learning by bringing high level educational content to anyone with an internet connection. This can open the door to many for personal development and learning. Getting academic credit is  another matter which means that the educational market will probably not be unduly threatened.

See stories: Thinking of College?  Go to YouTube First, by Marshall Kirkpatrick

                YouTube EDU  Brings Free Education to the Masses, By Adam Pash