[February 22, 2006]

Texas A&M may begin offering iLecture

(Comtex Business Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)COLLEGE STATION, Texas, Feb 22, 2006 (The Battalion, U-WIRE via COMTEX) --Imagine looking around campus and, instead of students listening to music on their iPods and mp3 players, they are listening to lectures, interviews and course-related material.

With advancing technology in the academic world, this could soon be a normal occurrence.

Technology and education are combining to present universities with more advanced teaching methods, through the utilization of iPods and podcasting, which is the downloading of sound, video and graphic files.

Aaron Brender, director of Internet Media Services at Texas A&M, said that education, at times, lags behind the mainstream population.

"Kids nowadays for the most part are a videogame society," he said. "This is how... students relate now. Instead of calling each other on the phone to talk they would rather IM each other."

Brender said some professors make lectures available through podcasts, but that it is not done across the board at A&M.

"We have to think of a lot of different scenarios to figure out, which is the best way to do it," he said. "And so we're gonna be a little bit behind the curve when we finally decide on what is the right way."

Texas A&M has incorporated technology into its courses in various ways through the years.

Michael S. Alvard's anthropology 205 class, for example, listens to a weekly radio show as part of the coursework.

Alvard's class is done solely through lectures available on television and over the Internet, along with the radio show. He said this format came about as students wanted more material available online and administrators wanted to free up classroom space.

"I haven't had any negative feedback from the students," he said. "(The grades) are downloaded from WebCT immediately. We don't have to deal with paper and pencil or trudge across campus to the office (that deals with scantrons). It just streamlines the process nicely."

Alvard said he would like to see lectures available for students to download to iPods and that this is something students have requested.

"To be honest, I think that this whole thing is going faster than the university is technically able to do it," he said.

According to www.apple.com, iTunes U is a service for colleges and universities that serves as a host for professor's educational content. Similar to iTunes, students would be able to subscribe to particular podcasts and save them to their portable mp3 players.

Stanford University and the University of Michigan's School of Dentistry are two schools that have already implemented the program.

For Jerred Crumley, a senior political science major, the possibility of downloading lectures to his iPod is not appealing.

"I like to sit down and be able to take notes," he said.

However, Crumley said he likes the flexibility of not having to attend class and that he takes advantage of this in his political science class because the lectures are available online.

"I was really surprised and I thought it was really good because it's a morning class and I have a really busy schedule because I work two days a week," he said.

For now, Brender said the legal and copyright issues are the main obstacle between the University and podcasting.

"It's just if we provide the ability to podcast we've got to realize that it has to be monitored to a degree," he said. "Otherwise people will podcast anything that may not (be in line with the law)."

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