iTunes U - sacred music education
  • Jeffrey CogginsJeffrey Coggins
    Posts: 360
    I was wondering if anybody here knew about iTunes U.

    Apple - iTunes U

    iTunes U Wikipedia page

    The service was created to manage, distribute, and control access to educational audio and video content and PDF files for students within a college or university as well as the broader Internet. The member institutions are given their own iTunes U site that makes use of Apple’s iTunes Store infrastructure. The online service is without cost to those uploading or downloading material.


    Wouldn't it be great to utilize such resources to educate people about Gregorian chant, et al - for FREE? All you need to access iTunes U is a computer running iTunes to access the iTunes Store. Currently, doing a search on iTunes U for "Gregorian chant" yields only 3 results: one video lecture, one audio example, and an entire album.
  • DougS
    Posts: 793
    At my institution, iTunes U is typically used as a way of delivering course content (e.g.,Powerpoint lectures with narration) for distance education courses. When it comes to music courses, using it is dicey because there are legal restrictions on the use of copy protected recorded sound. It would be easy to avoid this problem with content about chant, but my point is that there isn't a lot of incentive for the run-of-the-mill music professor to use it, generally speaking.

    Having had no practical experience with it, I can't say for sure but it also looks like there has to be an institutional relationship between iTunes and the party delivering the content. In other words, people off the street can't use it is a storehouse and distribution network for their materials. I could be wrong, though.

    Maybe someone in the CMAA with a university affiliation would be interested in pursuing it? It would require convincing some administrator that it would be worth it to host non-course-related materials. Not a battle I'd want to fight, especially given that Vimeo, YouTube, etc. are great places to share a/v resources.
  • Jeffrey CogginsJeffrey Coggins
    Posts: 360
    Vimeo, YouTube, etc. are great places to share a/v resources.


    Not for users who:
    * don't have Flash installed on their computer/mobile device for various reasons
    * are connected to a network which blocks particular websites such as YouTube
    • have trouble finding educational resources

    Sometimes, it's difficult to find exactly what you want on YouTube unless it contains proper keywords for you to find them - or you somehow know it's already there. Not everyone who is interested in learning Gregorian chant knows about CMAA, and not everything on YouTube is educational … It's easy to find educational resources on iTunes U because everything on there is educational. You could also be reaching a wider audience by having such materials on there.
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