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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.
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.
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.
Well, these are hosted on Apple's domain. So Stanford isn't storing the content or paying for the bandwidth.
this is almost forcing college kids to go out and buy apple compliant hardware if implemented on a mass scale
How so ? You can access the iTMS from a Windows PC or an Apple PC and I'm pretty sure there are hacks to get at it from Linux, though those are unsupported... what hardware do you have to buy ? You don't need an iPod to listen to these, and they're easily transcoded into MP3s; they aren't copy-protected, and you could transcode them even if they were FairPlay DRM'd.
Why not just have directories of MP3s ? There's a fine question. I think the answer is probably because Apple is offering this service for free, and most users will find it easier to use than a directory of MP3s. It's great, serious, sneaky hardcore marketing, but you're making it out to be evil... which I'm not sure it is.
I feel like I just responded to a troll... is the lack of Linux/Unix iTMS client support what's bugging you about this? Because I think that's probably the only justifiable complaint a person could have- otherwise, this is very, very cool.