This is part 5 of a series of posts documenting a vist to Apple headquarters in February, 2005. For the full series, see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6.
In my last post, I made the case that we should feel reasonably safe taking Apple at their word when they say that they want to keep iTunes U free and free from lock-in for the long-term. As far as I can tell, it’s not evil. In this post, I’m going to argue that it is, in fact, a force for good-good for the evolution of learning environments, good for the textbook market, and good for expanding the horizons of digitally-enhanced teaching and learning interactions.Let’s start with LMS’s and learning environments. If you think about how the majority of classes in the majority of colleges use an LMS, it’s primarily as a file sharing utility. Share the syllabus, share the handouts, share the assignments. iTunes U can serve this same purpose better than the typical LMS. You don’t have to go through logins and click through multiple screens to find what you want. The content is organized in an easy-to-use, hierarchical offline tool. And if you use RSS feeds, students don’t even have to explicitly log in to check for new documents; content is pushed right to their desktops whenever they are online and iTunes is open. As I noted in my last post, iTunes U supports PDFs, so teachers can send text documents as well as sound and video files. iTunes U even has a drop box and a sharing folder, so students can submit content to the teacher or to the class. (Currently upload is a browser-based interface, not built into iTunes itself.) If you supplement this capability with a discussion board and maybe a shared calendar, then you’ve provided pretty much everything that the majority of web-enhanced classes use today. You’ve also greatly diminished the value of licensing a traditional LMS to cover the entire campus. This is precisely why Apple draws the distinction between a learning management system (which is narrow) and a learning environment (which is broad).
And you’ve given Apple its halo effect opportunity. Sure, you can use iTunes U to share files easily without investing a dime in Apple equipment. But wouldn’t it be better if you could effortlessly download those files to your iPod and take them wherever you go? And wouldn’t you love to use a computer that comes bundled with free, easy-to-use content creation to make it easy for you to generate rich content to share in the first place?
Another potential watershed is the opportunity to use the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) as a textbook publishing medium. Apple was explicit about their goals in this regard. Following the model laid down for music (and now videos), textbook publishers would provide more even, commoditized pricing and support micro-commerce. (Wouldn’t it be great to have your students pay for only the five chapters that you intend to use for your class?) Add to that the ability to share competing faculty-created (and hopefully Creative Commons licensed) content through iTunes U, and you could see radical changes in the textbook market. In return, publishers can reduce the percentage of revenues lost to illegal photocopying and to the used textbook market. They can also keep a higher percentage of revenues by not having to sell through university book stores, and they can keep their content fresher, since the cost of issuing an update digitally is far, far lower than printing and shipping new books.
Of course, to make this economic transformation happen, we need one piece of hardware that doesn’t really exist yet-an affordable, easy-to-use ebook reader. Text isn’t going away any time soon, and students are just not going to read entire textbooks on their monitors or print them out on sheet paper. One has to hope that Apple is working on just such a beast.
In the meantime, if Apple is successful with iTunes U then we should see a proliferation of student- and faculty-created multimedia in the classroom. Apple’s iLife software suite really does drastically lower the barrier to producing audio, video, and digital images. iTunes, iPods, and video iPods make it easy for users to organize and use those newly created multimedia assets. iTunes U completes the ecosystem by making it easy to share the files. Honest to goodness, just about anyone can produce professional-sounding podcasts using Garage Band or a video using iMovie. Microsoft, of course, doesn’t stand still either. Expect competition in these consumer-level multimedia production tools to remain high, and expect the tools themselves to remain cheap or free.
All in all, iTunes U could have a huge effect on higher education. That said, in my next post I’ll outline some areas where they still have some work to do in order to really make iTunes U fly in enterprise higher ed.
Michael,
That penultimate paragraph is pretty Apple-centric, and reinforces my suspicion that iTunes U aims at creating an Apple-dominated higher education environment. If a school commits to iTunes U, are they committing to that vision as well, implicitly?
Why focus so narrowly on the Apple-branded ecosystem that iTunes U “completes”?
The reason I focus on an Apple-branded ecosystem is because Apple does. I’m trying to spell out what their stake is so that people can decide for themselves how harmless or pernicious it is and how likely it is to have a negative impact on their institution in the future.
Apple is attempting to walk a fine line. They argue that their products support industry standards (e.g., the MPEG-sponsored AAC audio rather than, say, the proprietary Windows Media format) and interoperability everywhere that standards exist. However, over and above the standards, their products tend to work best in general and work best with each other. For example, iMovie may save to MPEG4 and Garage Band to AAC, but the ease with which you can pull a Garage Band sound track into iMovie is Apple-specific and goes beyond the least-common-denominator interoperability that standards afford.
As long as they toe the line on standards, I don’t object. Why should I be unhappy if they provide a better user experience? If they come to “dominate” the campus by providing the best products, then so be it.
That said, making sure they stick to those standards religiously and expose the hooks wherever possible becomes very important. That’s why the copy-and-paste issue with iTunes and podcasting/podcatching is non-trivial.
Agreed on all counts. Part of what worries me about iTunes U is that its iPod-specific design, which I certainly can’t fault Apple for, becomes a de facto non-standard Apple-specific opportunity for lock-in. I can’t help thinking that Apple is leveraging a business practice no one could complain about–making products that work best when used together–into a situation where they’ll never need to worry about common standards again. The best analogy I can come up with right now is Internet Explorer and its relation to the Windows OS. Not good!