Pierce signs with iTunesU

Contract may lead to more multimedia options for learning

Ashley Geren / Roundup

Pierce College has recently signed a contract with iTunesU, and the distance education administration is working toward having the school’s section of the Web site up by mid-November.

In the new iTunes 9, the iTunes store has a separate tab just for education-related materials called iTunesU, which allows the user to organize and maintain education material while keeping it separate from the music in iTunes. The material can then be synced to iPods and iPhones to be accessible anywhere.

“Nothing else has been done (except the contract being signed),” said Cynthia Alexander, a faculty member in the Pierce online office. “We’re working right now just to get the skin — the look — for our page.”

“I think that students would use it because I believe that no matter how much you pay attention in class, there are things you can miss,” said Bryan Sanchez, 25, business management major. “Pierce is definitely keeping on the cutting edge of technology.” iTunesU provides podcasts, audiobooks, language lessons and other content for instructors to make accessible to students. This part of the iTunes store was immediately utilized by top universities including Stanford, Cambridge and Carnegie Mellon.

Pierce will soon be a provider of content for iTunesU, which is a completely free program and has more than 200,000 audio and video downloads.

Students are hoping their instructors will participate in making podcasts and other educational resources available to them as supplemental aids to their classes through iTunesU.

“The more help, the merrier. Being able to e-mail my professors is good, but there may be things in the podcast that I might not have thought about otherwise,” said Dalia Ghesser, 19, child psychology major.

Those taking online courses think it would be very helpful to have this resource available as a supplementary course aid.

Carrie Ray, music major, has taken online courses and thinks this would be very beneficial because “it will make the courses more personal. And they might serve like a lecture that the whole class watches.”

If you open your iTunes Store, the furthest tab to the right is iTunesU. Although Pierce is not yet on the list of colleges and universities to choose from, you can still browse material from every other ageren.roundupnews @gmail.com

Anyone can download iTunes for free on a Mac or PC, but only those with iPhones or an iPod Touch can sync the material for on-the-go use. For those students, they can have these resources available to them anytime, anywhere. With the fast-paced, multitasking lives of Pierce students, this partnership with iTunesU could benefit many.

Although mid-November is the projected time for the Pierce College page to be finished, it is hard to tell because the distance education department at Pierce is currently a person short. Alexander said once the new person is hired, the process will speed up.