iTunes used to be a great way to get away from homework, but now it's becoming part of the assignment.
The university has started testing the waters with iTunes U, the academic section of Apple's popular media store that allows educators to upload audio and video of lectures or supplementary materials for students.
At an event discussing the uses of iTunes U on Friday, several professors enthusiastically endorsed the system, saying it helped involve students in the class without decreasing attendance.
Professor Patricia Shields used the site to supplement her fall-semester genetics lectures with 10- to 20-minute movies explaining difficult concepts with Play-Doh and pipe cleaners.
Kristi Hall, a graduate assistant for Shields' BSCI222: Principles of Genetics class, said the system was also useful to hit on points that didn't get particular emphasis in class.
"We have too much material and not enough time to teach it," she said. "We wanted to do that in a fun, hip way."
Hall said students responded positively to the class's 11 short movies, one of which shows Shields sitting by a fire, drinking what appears to be brandy, reading vocabulary terms from an ancient dictionary.
"The students gave enormously positive feedback. They were actually sending us e-mails, 'We love this, we want more of this,'" Hall said, adding that several students offered up suggestions for new videos.
There are 575 total tracks, both audio and video, on the university's iTunes U academic site. They received 1,206 plays during the fall semester, according to Phyllis Johnson, director of communication for the Office of Information Technology.
Robert Gold dean of the School of Public Health, said that the school experimented with posting lectures online and found the majority of students used the files to supplement their class time, not justify skipping. He said the school conducted a study that found no discernible drop in attendance for classes that had lectures posted online.
The only problem is the difficulty of both uploading and downloading large files, such as the video of a 50-minute lecture, according to Deborah Mateik, an instructional designer for OIT. Many of the videos currently posted top out at about 20 minutes, and even then, she said, students have trouble with dropped connections and broken files.
The College of Arts and Humanities already has more than 500 videos online, said Heather Rodriguez, the IT coordinator for the school. She said language classes have already begun to take advantage of the site, with instructors posting pronunciation and vocabulary guides in both video and audio forms - perfect examples of the short, easily accessible files iTunes U seems to handle well.
Mateik ran a discussion on Friday detailing the benefits of the program for more than 30 faculty members. She emphasized the importance of engaging students and expanding on the materials they take home with them.
"Students live in a YouTube kind of world. How else can material be visualized? That's where the real potential of this program is," she said.
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