Coming to iTunes U
Posted by Devon Akmon | Filed under Technology, Work
At last, we are about to go live on iTunes U! For the past several months I have been building our institution’s profile. This has been a slow moving, and occasionally annoying, project. However, earlier today I submitted our final edits and we are set to have a public launch on Tuesday, October 20.
Before I point out some of the lessons learned, I need to explain iTunes U. According to Apple:
iTunes U is a part of the iTunes Store featuring free lectures, language lessons, audiobooks, and more, that you can enjoy on your iPod, iPhone, Mac or PC. Explore over 200,000 educational audio and video files from top universities, museums and public media organizations from around the world. With iTunes U, there’s no end to what or where you can learn.
iTunes U was launched in mid-2007 to help manage, distribute, and control access to educational audio and video content for both students and lifelong learners. There are three main types of educational providers within the iTunes U store: Universities and Colleges, Beyond Campus, and K-12 Education. Content is both free to host and download, which makes this a wonderful conduit for disseminating educational materials to the public.
Museums fall under the Beyond Campus umbrella. Currently, there are approximately 62 providers within this category, which also includes historical societies and public radio/television. Of the 62 profiles, approximately 15 are museums.
I learned a few lessons along the way that will be useful to others building their profile. The first tip I recommend is to remember that iTunes U is built on the same infrastructure as the popular iTunes Store. This has both advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, millions of people are already going to the iTunes Store for audio and video content. The disadvantage is that you must remember that everything needs to be constructed as an album. For example, when organizing the content for our biannual arts conference, I created one album with seven tabs for various content (a general bucket for miscellaneous content, one for the opening performance, and five for individual panel presentations; see below).
Seems like a reasonable way to organize content, right? After receiving feedback from an Apple representative, I learned this was a big mistake and it was not recommend from a usability standpoint. Therefore, I needed to reorganize all of the material (various tabs) as individual albums. In addition to better usability, this has the added advantage of optimizing better results from search inquiries.
Next, be sure to get your metadata right on the first attempt. Once you have uploaded your content, you cannot edit the metadata without making the necessary changes and then re-uploading the content. The upload process is slow, and this can set you back hours! Here is a shot of the back-end, which is accessed via a web browser and it is where you upload and organize your content.
Here are a couple of shots of our profile (note that the blue “edit” column to the right will not be seen by the visitor, and this will bring the content higher up). We are hoping to add much more content in the near future. If you get a chance to visit our profile, send some feedback my way. I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.
On a final note, be sure to check out the Walker Art Center’s New Media Initiatives blog for additional information on building an iTunes U profile.
- Devon Akmon
Tags: Technology, Work
