October 2012 marked the fourth anniversary of the launch of Oxford’s iTunesU site, featuring audio and video podcasts from across the University. It has been a great success – 19 million downloads so far, and currently reaching a worldwide audience of 185 countries. Oxford on iTunesU has grown from a very small corpus to more than 4,000 hours of material online – ranging from quantum states to welfare states, from Philosophy for Beginners to Quantum Mechanics. This free site managed by Academic IT Services has achieved the altruistic aim of bringing Oxford thinking to a broad global audience, whilst giving our current students, staff and alumni any-time access to a wider range of lectures than they might physically be able to attend.
If you have iTunes on your computer already click here to visit Oxford’s site
Key facts since launch of Oxford on iTunesU on October 8th 2008
- 19 million downloads from iTunesU
- 4,200 podcast items processed
- 3,480 academic speakers and contributors
- A worldwide audience of 185 countries (including 31% from the USA, 17% from the UK and 7% from China)
Recent highlights in Autumn 2012 include:
- From Bench to Bedside : 50 talks on Translational Medicine
- ??Oxford Alumni Conference 2012 – over 100 talks from the best of Oxford
- ??Alan Turing : A Centenary Conference on the famous mathematician
- ?Engage – Social Media for Dissemination and Public Engagement with Marcus Du Sautoy and colleagues??
- The Chemistry of the Botanic Garden
- First World War: New Perspectives
- Children’s Language and Literacy and Impairments
- Great Writers Inspire – Over 30 short talks on famous writers
The support team within Academic IT Services has continued to improve and expand the help, support and resources offered – including regular briefing sessions run fortnightly on the technical and legal issues of audio and video recording. Oxford staff can benefit from our podcasting overview session and more advanced media training - See http://www.it.ox.ac.uk/courses
Many more departments are now using the service to disseminate their public lectures and to engage with the public and to make sure all users can access the material, we have our updated parallel website, http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk which meets the needs of those learners restricted to web only access or those that wish to find the material through Google searches. This web portal, with the same content as Oxford on iTunes U, offers a web friendly view of Oxford’s lectures and has the following features:
- Material can be searched by department / college / keyword
- Creative Commons licenced material for educational reuse is available at http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/open
- Material is ranked highly in Google Searches