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Stanford Classes Now Available on iTunes
Chowser writes "Forbes is reporting Stanford University is now offering a wide range of content on iTunes. From the article: 'In an unprecedented move, Stanford University is collaborating with Apple Computer to allow public access a wide range of lectures, speeches, debates and other university content through iTunes. No need to pay the $31,200 tuition. No need to live on campus. No need even to be a student. The nearly 500 tracks that constitute "Stanford on iTunes" are available to anyone willing to spend the few minutes it takes to download them from the Internet.'" Talaper noted the Official Apple Page on the program is up as well.
I think the Universities understand that employers don't generally have the cognitive skills to understand whether an applicants is qualified for a particular job and must really on earned degrees from institutions to tell them if they should or in some cases even can hire somebody. With this idea so entrenched in our corporate culture the University need not fear giving away their content because that isn't what is actually valuable in the market--the degree is. A person who gets a degree from Stanford but retains no learning will have a much easier time getting a well-paid job than a person without the degree who nevertheless memorized and internalized every bit of information Stanford gives away.
A good project: develop an open-source way to transmit and store presentations in a useful and navigatable form. Lectures need three streams - the audio, the presenter's face, and the graphics. The graphics need to be at much higher resolution, and should be sent as clean still images when possible. One output should be a web page, with thumbnails for the graphics and clickable audio segments. Then you can find something in the lecture when you need it.
The presentation should be run through a voice recognition system, to make the voice searchable. It doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough for search. Similarly, OCR the graphics and pull keywords from them.
Education and knowledge seem to have no value- it's only the degree and the name at the top of the certificate which has any currency...
I'm pretty sure the meant, no need to be a student to download the tracks. Not: No need to be a student because you can get your education through iTunes.
Universities have ample server space and bandwidth to transfer audio files (especially heavily compressed ones at that) to their students. It'd be super easy for any University worth its salt to create a central repository that students (and possibly others) can access via a standard web browser in order to download some encoded audio files (perhaps ones that might even play on non-windows/apple OSes)
:P
The only reason I can think why they would want to do this is if they are getting a bunch of $$$ from apple somehow because this is almost forcing college kids to go out and buy apple compliant hardware if implemented on a mass scale...slippery slope people...we don't want our educational institutions to lock up knowledge in a proprietary service like this.
My professors can figure out how to post lecture slides as pdf files on the class web page. Surely they could post an mp3 or ogg if they so desired. It's probably less hassle than dealing with this itunes u service. It just baffles me that this even exists because all a podcast is is audio and an RSS feed, both things that any university could roll on their own if they wanted.
MIT's open course ware is a step in the right direction because it's available to everyone and is platform independent. Why lock in to itunes when you can get the freedom of posting things yourself?????
I can see it now...10 years from now a new iPod paired with a "trusted computer" will be included in the tuition price of every college student entering university to ensure that they can became drones of Apple, inflate Apple's stock price, and kill any chance that a student would use some sort of open operating system....er umm, i mean... listen to required lectures..yes children, this is to make it easy for you to listen to lectures...not so we can control your purchasing habits....yup.
Yes, clearly. Knowledge (especially free knowledge) is always a bad idea to arm the masses with. Allowing persons very interested in a particular subject access to informtion from a highly-esteemed university in spite of [perhaps] barriers that may have prevented them from attending that university (or any university at all) is indeed "pretty useless".
The commoditization of education as your (+3 Informative!) comment implies is one of the larger factors [in my opinion] in the steady decline of the US as a knowledge leader.
--- What
That takes a very limited definition of "value". I think you underestimate the number of people who would (informally) like to learn more. This provides a much easier avenue for doing just that. For some people, the line "learning is a lifelong experience" isn't just a line.
While you can get a good education at almost any college, and be forced to get one to a greater or lesser degree depending on how rigorous the curriculum is, the tuition pays for the credential: a Bachelor of Science from Stanford means a lot more to potential employers than "I listened to all the lectures and did all the problem sets required for a Stanford degree. No really, I did!"
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You presume he learns better from reading than listening. Some people learn better hands-on. Some require a mix. One learning method isn't perfect for everyone.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Statements like that are why the education system in many Western countries is in such a state.
Holy generalizations. And bad ones at that. (a state of what?)
No longer do people pursue degrees for the love of the subject, they just want a nice piece of paper to wave in front of possible employers.
The point of college *is* to make yourself more employable.
It's a shame that for many personal achievement is now a distant second to what other people think of the letters after your name.
I'm proud of both my education and the fact that I provide well for my family. I was smart enough to do both, and not just one.
If I am learning for the sake of learning - and I do it regularly - I don't sit down and listen to a recorded lecture. I explore. My degree is in aerospace engineering. My interests also lie in other fields. Like robotics. I program AVR's. I play with digital image processing. I read papers by professionals, who I can then get in contact with regarding questions. I attend graduate school. I attend **real classes** and conferences (even unrelated to my field of work) where I can experance interactive education. Communing with people is where it is at.
Listening to recorded lectures is stupid. It is a one-way communication. Learning is a two-way street both for the student and the professor.
Wow, that'd be great. I can see it now: Student A, who has plenty of money, pays for regular "tutoring" sessions with the instructor, and thus recieves an excellent education. In contrast, student B is barely scraping by because he can't afford tutoring very often, since now that University is "free", there's no need for the government to offer financial aid, or at the very least, it can be drastically reduced, thus creating an economically stratified society the likes of which hasn't been seen since pre-englightenment Europe. Wow, where do I sign up? Just curious though, if the students aren't paying tuition any more, who is paying the professors to record lectures? I guess we could just hire a professor to record the lecture once, and then replay it for the next 20 years or so, kinda like a textbook. Awe hell, I've got it, let's just pay voice actors to read the text book out loud, and then distribute that to students, and call it a college education. Of course, with zero student contact outside of paid tutoring sessions, it might be hard for the instructor to maintain any semblance of objectivity when it comes time to grade all the essay papers at the end of the semester. I mean, are you really going to fail your meal ticket when there is a direct correlation between how often they show up and how much you make? And then there's the issue of who's going to pay the instructor to do all the administrative work, i.e. grading. If the sum of all the knowledge you gained in college could be replicated by a couple books on tape and a tutor, you got fleeced.
College is the quickest way to acquire the skills necessary to learn any other job. If you knew many 18 year olds, you would know that most of them are clueless, they need specific understanding of core concepts if they plan to go on to a successful career.
An example: Computer Science. Sure you can teach yourself to program, nothing terribly difficult about programming. In fact many of us were doing it as soon as we could reach a keyboard. This however does not teach you other concepts. What a state machine is, why it is useful? What a B-tree is, why is it useful? Programming in a group, and what tools you might use. These are the most basic concepts that you get.
Further most of a job involves communication, writing memos, writing emails, and attending meetings. Things that a liberal education provides.
Further if you finish you have learned all this plus how to plan, accomplish tasks on time, and completed to a your bosses or clients requirements.
Lastly, this is not the end, you should continue learning formal learning. Why? Because reading a book is great, but only a formal environment provides goals, and incentive to get things done.
"No need to live on campus. No need even to be a student." That would be right, were it not the case that education has never been about "education" but is really about "signalling".
Depends, if you have a masters (or even BS) from Stanford in EE or CS with a very good GPA then I bow down before your study skills. Why? Because I see what the people who get those grades are like and how much they need to study. Just because your college or field is easy doesn't mean all are.
Not in the Vatican, it's not.
Yes it is. If the people there consent to be ruled by their government, then what is the problem? It is up to them to say what they can and cannot do, not any of us.
How is itunes, which is freely downloadable and accessible to a majority of the English speaking world (and beyond), not "public". Is it because they also charge for content? If so I can't really see the complaint with a vendor giving away material for free. Presumably they have an angle, free advertisement and hoping for impulse buys spring to mind, but come on. Sure there isn't a linux version of iTunes - but that's sort of like complaining that they aren't giving away the brand of free beer that you like.