Open Universiteit on iTunes U
 | 2nd of February 2010 the Dutch Open Universiteit and the Delft University of Technology launched their iTunes U portals at the e-learning congress in Eindhoven. These are the first Dutch universities to use iTunes U as a platform to distribute knowledge. For the OU the launch of iTunes U is a next step in its policy towards open educational resources (OER). |
The Open Universiteit offers on iTunes U lectures, learning and other materials on very diverse topics. But it offers also many extra services, like forms of tutoring and support and life-long-learning services. The user can listen or watch an audiovisual lecture or presentation whenever and wherever he wants. He can watch the audio and video live or download these on Mac, PC, iPod or iPhone.
Open Educational Resources
As the leading institution in flexible delivery of distance education and lifelong learning the Open Universiteit is continually searching for ways to use the new, digital developments for distance education. Our policy is to promote open educational resources. Offering our materials for free or for reduced costs, online, through e-bookreaders but also by mobile phones, supports this policy.
With OpenER (www.opener.ou.nl) the OU was one of the first institutions in the Netherlands to offer free academic on-line courses.
As a member of the Free Technology Academy (www.ftacademy.org) the Open Universiteit develops a programme on open source software for which the learning materials can be downloaded for free.
And now Open Universiteit publishes on iTunes U.
CELSTEC project TUVA: Unified Video/Audio Content Management
CELSTEC played an important role in preparing the publishing of the content on iTunes U. The opening of the iTunes U portal forms part of a larger project, called TUVA. TUVA stands for “Towards Unified Video/Audio Content Management at the Open Universiteit”. Within the Open Universiteit there are several departments producing video for different purposes. Aim of this project is to
- standardize the processes of post-processing the video programmes
- create a standardized management of flexible video formats and metadata formats
- create a unified and semi-automated process of storage, conversion and delivery of rich multimedia resources.
iTunes U is one of the channels of delivery. The TUVA project was defined by the CELSTEC Learning Media programme.
