O.K. so I’m old.  When I was in college, cell phones didn’t exist and the latest tech was a portable electric typewriter with correction ribbon.  Now you can get class lectures (and even notes) via the internet through, iTunes U.

What is iTunes U ?  It is the section of iTunes where free educational material is available from Universities like Stanford, Duke, Yale, and now University College London and Open University, England; University of Melbourne, and the University of Western Australia, from Australia; and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

This material includes class lectures and whole courses on subjects from the Humanities to the Sciences.  This section will let you access courses or information by subject area, University or topic.  The offerings may be in both audio and video or only one medium or the other.

Included with the university offerings, are museums like MoMA (Metropolitan Museum of Art), and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; PBS (Public Broadcasting Station) offerings like American Public Media and KQED; and other educational providers.  All of these sources, as stated, before are free.  You can find information on just about any topic and what’s more, you can download the information or an entire course or series from iTunes U for later viewing/listening. 

The downloads are compatible with PCs, Macs, iPods, iPhones, and any other portable device that will allow synchronizing with iTunes.  Soon Blackberry’s will have that option through Desktop 4.6.

Online classes are nothing new.  Many Universities and Community Colleges offer at least a few online courses.  Some even offer continuing education courses on line.  Generally, these online course are not free.

Free course content from various universities in different countries is new and offers students new resources for learning and understanding.  If they have a hard time understanding Quantum Physics, as taught by their professor, they can download lectures from various universities to hear the information presented in a different way, hopefully gaining a better understanding.

For people without the funds to attend a university, but with the desire to learn, iTunes U offers a wonderful variety of subjects, topics and ways of accessing information from many different educational sources for free.

Browsing through the offerings can reveal lectures presented by noted experts in various fields that you would not be able to access anywhere else.  Listening to Marian Wright Edelman, Paul Krugman, Andrew Young, Janet Reno, and others, is incredible and with the Duke Featured Speakers podcast series, you have that opportunity.

Education doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg or end when you graduate from College (University for you Brits).  When you want to know something more about a topic or just to be able to keep up with your kids, iTunes U is there.

Take advantage of it.

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Entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 12:11 pm under Internet.

Read more entries by Susan Wilson.
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