Warwick iTunes U goes live

In a bid to become more accessible to the general public, Warwick has become the first university in the West Midlands to establish the new ‘iTunes U Service’.

This new service will host electronic lectures and talks from the archive of the last ten years of the Writers at Warwick programme, including Jacqueline Wilson and acclaimed writer Alain De Bottom.

It also features hundreds of audio and video tracks covering a wide range of topics and interests and can be found online at http://itunes.warwick.ac.uk.

The launch of the site has been the work of the University’s Digital press, a relatively new team established for the simple goal of developing digital media content. The Digital Press team are no strangers to technology having to work with e-learning on almost daily basis, but they hope that this experience will help them add new features to the site keeping it as up to date as possible.

The innovative service is set to include user-generated content too, starting with a series of films made by undergraduate students in Chemistry. The University hope that as the service becomes popular, students and academic staff alike will be able to contribute to iTunes U as a main resource for learning material.

Over the next few months, material from the £50000 Warwick Prize for Writing will also be added. The first award from this fund is set to be handed out in 2009 with the winner being featured on iTunes U.

Professor Nigel Thrift, the vice Chancellor of the University of Warwick was excited about the news stating: iTunes U is an important resource for the University allowing us to share our outstanding academic research and teaching community with learners and academics worldwide[…] iTunes U is an important way for us to bring new communities of interest into the academic conversation.”