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.

Comments

MIT OpenCourseWare

[mysqlrocks]

Glad to see other universities are following the trend set by MIT with their OpenCourseWare project. It's interesting to see universities have faith that putting this content out for public consumption will not detract from their mission.

This is impressive

[ackthpt]

Also consider that Stanford is a private university, not public.

Meanwhile the Vatican is defending copyrighting the Pope's pronouncements. Which, IMHO, is right up there with copyright of MLK's 'I Have A Dream' and Co$'s copyrighted "Trade Secrets"

Nice move ya floppy tree :-)

Re:cheap degrees @ home

[ackthpt]

99 cents per lecture, get your ONLINE degree from iTunes today

Not quite. The downside is these are a on-sided, read only participation of the material, which in my experience isn't quite as good as having it followed by a good old fashion Q & A session.

Also, the sheepskin from Stanford comes only with that Tuition deal. I don't think you'd get very far trying to set up your own school with them either, i.e. Bob University (based upon actual Stanford materials, but with our EZ-Pass exams!)

Commoditizing teachers

[nharmon]

My experience in college has been that a teacher spends most of his/her time helping a relatively small minority of a class. So it would seem reasonable that the rest of the students could learn as much, or more, in a class using pre-recorded lectures over the internet.

I would like to see this lead to a fairly nice public education model where online universities that are publicly subsidized allow students to take classes for free, and then the student pays for the teacher's time when he/she needs that extra help.

Definitely won't detract

[sterno]

Making the content available is all positive for these universities. If I downloaded everything they made, and studied it thoroughly, I might have a strong grasp of the subject matter but I still wouldn't have a degree from MIT or Stanford. In the end there's value in the degree because it certifies your knowledge. If you go for a job interview, etc, and say I downloaded Stanford's coursework from ITunes, I rather doubt they'd consider me on par with a Stanfor graduate.

It's a good thing for them because it builds their image. It shows an interest in promotion education in general and sharing knowledge with those who cannot afford the $30K+. It also gives prospective students a chance to see what that money would be going for before they shell it out. So really all around a good thing for them.

I listened to some this morning

[mccalli]

This cropped up on macrumors.com last night, and I took the opportunity to grab the music tracks and a few lectures. I listened to "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" this morning - can thoroughly recommend it. I chose it purely based on the title, it turns out to be a lecture on the physiological nature of stress and was very interesting.

The music? Well...I liked it, but sorry Stanford - it's mostly very derivative and most bands seem to be directly pretending to be another cmmercial one. What happened to colleges doing new forms of music and experimental stuff?

Cheers,
Ian

Re:good deal

[tpgp]

Good deal.

Sounds like a great idea!

Sounds like a nice counterpart to MIT's OpenCourseWare.

Unfortunately not... MIT's OpenCourseWare is well... Open.

Stanford on iTunes however requires an expensive piece of software (OS X or Windows) to use it.

I don't have a Mac, I don't run Windows - how am I supposed to access this?

I guess this what you can expect from a University that puts a 1 page FAQ in a PDF (why dear god, why?)

Good for some people I acknowledge, but no OpenCourseWare.

Law School Courses Available

[Landaras]

This is a shameless plug, but it's on-topic.

I've been recreating my law school lectures at the University of Cincinnati (where I am a first-year student focusing on copyright and technology law). Instead of recording the raw lecture audio, and dealing with the copyright and privacy concerns, I've been taking detailed notes, adding my own analysis, and capturing new creative expression. (Yes there are still some copyright issues, but my lawyer and I are in agreement that what I am doing does fall under Fair Use.) This new creative expression is then placed under CC-Attribution and the GNU FDL so others can do new and innovative things with it.

I recorded roughly one 15-20 minute episode per lecture, with about 40 lectures in each of my four substantive classes.

My episodes are available for manual download and in podcast format through the iTunes Music Store (search for "Life of a Law Student"). This semester I have recruited some additional students to come on board. This way we can expand to other law schools and to undergraduate law / political science courses.

Here is the site, and I am still looking for students to help. Additionally, if you have technology skills (this is Slashdot after all), I need volunteers as we revamp our back-end software and deal with an influx of new material.

Contact me if you are interested in being a part of this.

- Neil Wehneman

P.S. For those who are wondering if my "re-lectures" are credible, I scored a 3.77 GPA last semester. Although I don't get my class rank for a few more days, I've been told by the administration that this should land me in the top 10% of the class.