iTunesU – you need to learn how to search it…

[imogenbertin]

Hi all!

This week I’ve put the “bullet points” at the top of my post and what I actually found (the boring bits) at the bottom. I did a range of searches to try to test out different strengths in different resources.

The main thing I want to mention because I don’t think many people know how to do this, is how you search iTunesU – there is a rake of useful stuff on there, lots of it free, but how to search isn’t obvious at all.

1. You do it through iTunes not your web browser.

2. Go to the store in iTunes and use the search box at the top right. Make your search terms exact ie put speech marks around them.

3. Filter the results (you’ll get a bunch of silly apps at the top…) by iTunesU using the option on the right of the screen.

Another tip for anyone who doesn’t know is how to search for creative commons licensed material that you can re-use: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/find-creative-commons-content-google/

So… I used these search terms on the various sites: Pensions, Digital Literacy, iPad, Neurological Rehabilitation and fall prevention.

Jorum: love the new beta search – it’s really good and fast and I would use it again but the results weren’t great.

Merlot: foul user interface, like the peer review, institutional affiliations often unclear, very US-based. I want to know if it’s an OU resource because I’m more likely to use it because the quality should be good. When I followed links, lots were broken, and good-sounding links went to basic low quality websites. So useful as a final pass or for activities, but I do not think I’d use this that much.

Learn Higher. A bit pointless really. Bad user interface and search, hard to “go back” and refine searches, poor results (irrelevant or none).

HEA Academy: website very slow. Little for direct re-use but I think better for academic research and specifically academic topics. Mostly projects they funded – not a great interface to directly search for reusable resources. Would use it as a “final pass” search for things I might have missed.

OpenLearn: too much in the way of graphics, not really optimised for mobile. Same hit often repeated to fill the entire search results page. Searching for exact terms often produces no results. Unlikely to try this one again.

YouTube rocks! It always had a great search engine, unsurprisingly. iPad results fairly rubbish due to people gaming the search for commercial reasons unfortunately – you’d have to use more specific search terms on that.

TED: poor internal search engine. As all TED talks are on YouTube, just do the search there with TED added to the search terms…

iTunes U – as explained above, if you know how to search it, then it’s actually very good. Except that as with YouTube the SEO ninjas like to add “digital” to everything, which is annoying and produces irrelevant stuff. Note to all: if developing content for iTunesU, your cover image MUST explain what’s in the tin clearly as people pick based on the “album artwork”.

Boring detail below:

Jorum – I used the beta search and liked it. Pension – a good OU resource. Digital literacy – some were information literacy, some general literacy. Not that much directly categorised. iPad – lots of apparently irrelevant. Neurological rehabilitation – nothing. Fall prevention – nothing.

Merlot – foul, overly-busy user interface which really put me off using it at all. Like the peer review. Not clear on display of institutional affiliations. Pension – various irrelevant presentations, a calculator which was interesting, the same OU paper but under the author’s name without the “cachet” of the OU so I might not have spotted it. Too US based. Digital literacy – again mainly about teaching literacy through digital means, or information literacy. An interesting sounding digital literacy web quest link did not work. iPad – mainly apps. A site called teach with your iPad which rated high was very basic. You could spent hours on Merlot without finding anything useful. Nothing for neurological rehabilitation. Fall prevention – health and safety at work info only. Would be worth a final trawl here in future but a bit of a time waster.

Learn HIgher. Why do you have to “click here” before you get to the actual result? Pensions – nothing. Digital literacy – lots but mainly poor quality e.g. very badly designed slideshares.  Hard to go “back” on your searches – stupid form resubmission page. iPad – nothing. Would not allow me to type neurological rehabilitation into the box. Three completely irrelevant results for fall prevention. Pointless.

HEA academy (website is slow) – Pensions. Nothing relevant. Digital literacy – marginal relevance of complex projects. Nothing for direct re-use but good for academic research maybe? iPads. One cancelled workshop. Neurological rehabilitation – a couple of useful hits for computer applications aimed at assisting with cognitive rehabilitation after stroke. Fall prevention – nothing relevant. Useful for specialist topics maybe…

OpenLearn – too much graphics stuff website not optimised for small screens/mobile. Pensions –  same hit for quite an interesting resource about the pensions time bomb but repeated hit filled the whole page!  Digital literacy – just provides hits based around digital, not both search terms. Searching for exact term produces no results. iPad – bizarre results about e.g. crime statistics for theft of tablets. Neurological rehabilitation – two completely irrelevant results. Fall prevention – just picking up prevention. Waste of time.

Re:source – pensions nothing. Digital literacy some stuff but nothing really relevant. iPad a couple of hits on app development. Neurological rehabilitation – one not very relevant hit. Fall prevention – 3 irrelevant. Would not bother with this oe again.

youTube – mainly news but pensions gets a good intro to pensions straight away about 10 mins long – I’d probably use this. Digital literacy – lots of stuff we’ve spoken about on this course e.g. Doug Belshaw, Howard Rheingold. Good. Maybe I’ll finally get to watch the Howard thing that I could not access because the course link was to a site banned by the work firewall… iPad – mostly rubbish, you’d have to use a more specific search term but you’ll find pretty much anything you want to know on Youtube… Neurological rehabilitation. Good – lots of useful hits. Fall prevention – excellent. YouTube rocks! It always did have a great search engine…

TED: pensions – nothing relevant. Digital literacy – howard rheingold about result 6 or 7. Not great. Thought there would be more. iPad – stuff about problems with the TED iPad app. Neurological rehabilitation – interesting talks but tangentially relevant. Fall prevention – just prevention terms. Bottom line: all TED talks are on YouTube and the YouTube search engine is better so find them there.

iTunesU – you need to know how to do a search on this which should have been explained… You do not search on the Internet. You load iTunes, go to the iTunes store, do a search with the box at the top right using exact search terms surrounded by “” and then filter it (right hand side) for iTunesU material. Pensions – lots of interesting OU material. You have to filter on every search… Digital literacies – some excellent resources but a lot of irrelevant stuff that someone decided to tag their course with “digital”. iPad – excellent and comprehensive materials as you would expect. Neurological rehabilitation – one free dissertation. Fall prevention – lots of material. I would definitely use iTunesU again.

[GrahamRGibbs]

Imogen, a really interesting and detailed and thoughtful set of comments on your experience. I certainly like your comment about YouTube – “it rocks!”. That’s certainly my experience.

On an HEA OER phase 2 project a year or so ago, we did some work with some focus groups on how they looked for resources. Overwhelming we found people preferred the Google interface to that provided by Jorum, Merlot and Humbase. And that was not only because the search engine was well optimised but because there was enough information showing against each find for them to decide whether to go look in more detail at the resource. My experience is that in the end you cannot avoid watching or listening (or reading) the resource all the way through before it gets used or given to students. So what you need is a way of filtering down finds very quickly to just the few that look good and relevant. Google clearly have a lot of experience of doing that! I think YouTube does this well too as the resources are often short (and YouTube tells you how long they are) and you can watch them easily and rapidly.

I have to say that I’ve been less impressed with iTunes – except for one fabulous video that the Open University produced – but which they then withdrew! I like your good hints on how to search iTunes. It’s also worth bearing in mind that (unlike YouTube) when you subscribe to something on iTunes it is actually downloaded to your hard disk. So I actually found I had a copy of the withdrawn video. Now, of course, I’m not sure about the ethics of using it. (It doesn’t have a CC license)

The one that disappoints me most is the HEA resource. One of my big OER projects was an NTF project funded by the HEA, yet finding the wealth of video, audio and textual materials that we produced and that is openly available with CC license on our website  is almost impossible with the HEA search facility. It appears only as a funded project with no mention of the resources themselves. Memo to self – I must badger the HEA to change this.

[philtubman]

I’m actually quite a supporter of iTunes U, even though people don’t like that you have to enter it via the iTunes client. iTunes client is free and the resources are downloadable, as Graham points out. I watched a fantastic series on Justice, by Michael Sandel through iTunes U. Even though the client is proprietary, it is worth mentioning that the videos or podcasts have open standards, so you don’t even need the client once its downloaded, certainly not necessary to have an iPod or iPhone, as some mistakenly think.

I also worked on one of the Phase 2 OER projects, which had a ‘discoverabiliy’ focus. We recognised that most people want to search through google, so hit the SEO Ninjas sites to raise its Google profile. The problem with this is that unless the resources start to take a life of their own and people independently tweet on etc. then the SEO magic starts to lost some of its capability. Fine, say, if you work in a ‘marketplace’ where constant SEO will maintain your page 1 discoverability, but OERs do not have a ‘hype’ cycle to them in most cases. By this I mean the short termism of ‘retweet’, ‘reblog’, ‘backlink’ that gives such good SEO results to start with does not apply to OER in that the availability of the resource needs to be constantly high, regardless whether anyone has ‘backlinked’ to it this week.

And that’s why I perhaps have a soft spot for iTunes U as an OER repository. Its available, most people use it for their media management, its free for those who don’t, EVERYONE has heard of it, and the search will not degrade resources based on this weeks popularity. And as previously said it uses open standards and the content is downloadable, therefore transferrable into areas of little bandwidth via HDDs etc. My feeling is that TOTALLY ONLINE content, like Coursera or EdX, is great for the software developers and those in the centre keeping track of the stats, but not so for the areas of lesser bandwidth, arguably those who need the OER the most.

[Rachel Temple]

Hi All,

Thank you for your posting on iTunesU, Imogen, it inspired me to try again!

It’s a resource that everyone knows about, but which I rarely visit.  I used the search function and searched for ‘Moodle’ and found loads of free content which I will be exploring.  Even though the Search button is right there in front of you, the tendency is to browse by category, so using the Search function is the way forward.

I also used Jorum and applied the same search term ‘Moodle’.  I found lots of the excellent York St John’s Moodle 2 resources, which I was already aware of.  New to me was the use of Piwik, an open-source web analytics software as an alternative to Google Analytics.  I chose to look at this for my own interest, but also because the project was JISC funded.

I hadn’t used Jorum before and would use it again.  Yesterday’s webinar pointed me in the direction of Jorum Beta, and I have to say that I felt much more comfortable and in control using the beta search engine.

My final thought on all of this is that you have to allow yourself time to explore and experiment with the different platforms.  I expected to just  jump in and do a quick search and it was only when I slowed down and started playing with the environments and their searches that I got good results.

 

[GrahamRGibbs]

Rachel,

you make a good point about allowing “yourself time to explore and experiment with the different platforms”. I suspect one of the reasons our focus group participants liked Google was that they were familiar with it. The more you spend time with a system the better you understand how it works and the better results you can get with it. Sadly, not all systems are the same in how they operate.

My search of iTunesU was for material on social research methods and one of the constant problems I come up against in search engines here is that such a topic is cross disciplinary. That’s why I disliked Jorum at the start (it’s got a lot better now). It was excessively focused on the Jacs discipline codes and very poor on the free text (and meta data) searches.

Another issue with iTunesU is the reusablility of the material. I can find hour long lectures on, say, questionnaire design, but I only want to use a small section of it and there is no easy way of cutting out what is needed and it is not clear if that is legitimate. In fact it’s not simple to find the licensing conditions of resources. This may also be a consequence of the fact that many of the materials on iTunesU are courseware. Hence the hour long audio recording of a lecture on questionnaire design. In my view that makes them much harder to repurpose or reuse on my teaching.

[GrahamRGibbs]

Phil,

that’s a good point about the diminishing discoverability of resources as twitter and blog mentions decline. I guess that’s why we need good quality repositories with good search mechanisms and, above all, properly written and well-curated meta data.

Nevertheless, as I said before, in the end you have to spend time looking at the resources in detail. In fact I suspect this is a matter of academic and educational pride. As teachers we feel we have to ‘approve’ the materials we use or at least use it in a context which we can control so that students can give it an appropriate critical appraisal. In the end, I think this is a good thing. Students know that that is what we are doing and they know that what we recommend is worth looking at and using. Essentially everything we do with and think about text books and research articles and how we recommend them is true of other educational resources.

[Rachel Temple]

Graham,

Thanks for your posting.  I have a sneaking suspicion that you are spot on with your analysis of search habits being informed by Google.  I did feel a strange sense of relief when I used Google to continue my search for Piwik Analytics- back on familiar territory!

Your point about reusability and editing of OERs really made me think through the whole concept of OERs.  I hadn’t previously thought enough about the re-purposing side, just the resource as a resource and the correct licence.

But of course!  An hour long podcast is quite long in the first place. It’s a long time to sit and listen attentively and I haven’t yet listened to all of the one I just downloaded and I downloaded enthusiatically.

[philtubman]

Graham,

You’re exactly right about the careful curation of resources. You have to look deep into the resource to see if it is useful, and then be prepared to roll up sleeves and do some more mashing and remixing to make it fit for your purpose. I’ve been a proponent of sharing source files, more specifically ‘open source’.

Saying this, I’ve seen some great content on iTunes U that stands alone, and I think that is the way it is formed into a ‘course’ in a way that ‘assets’ are not. cMOOCs seem to be something else entirely – although both share a ‘narrative’

I’m starting to believe that the sharing of resources should be something more akin to open source software development, where content can be sliced, diced, discovered, remixed at will, at any stage, and preferably as close to the production of value as possible.

I think we need to somehow ‘level’ the playing field so the ‘assets’ are exchangable, in an open standard. I like these repositories, but on the other hand, silo’s are good only for those who maintain, empty and fill them at the end of the day, and much content goes ‘unforked’ because it is locked behind non-open formats, or as you say, licences!

[ElizabethECharl]

Just like Rachel I was inspired to have another go at using iTunesU after reading the posts in this conversation thread, so many thanks for that Imogen.

Phil – perhaps linked open data may redress the situation and enable/facilitate the ability to slice and dice OER and other resources.

 

 

 

[imogenbertin]

Hi Rachel, Graham and everyone

I’m so happy I’ve done something useful at last on this course! I was beginning to feel my only role was to carp about not being able to use/find things!

This presentation by Terese Bird is great about iTunesU and OER: http://www.slideshare.net/tbirdcymru/i-tunesu-successfuloer11

I did post elsewhere something which I think can often be used with iTunes search which may be a workaround, in some situations, for Graham’s wish to edit courseware (which I totally support – I’m with Chris Peglar, when I’m learning I really get peeved if my time is wasted with “padding” introductions or irrelevant content). However, it does also add to the time taken in reviewing resources, which again I agree with Graham is vital, but a burden too.

[I’ve seen posted on the ALT lists estimates of 8 hours per 1 hour of teaching preparation time for TEL compared to the traditional 2 hours for 1… what do y’all think about that? Anyway…]

1. If it’s on iTunes it’s probably on YouTube somewhere as well or as an individual resource on an institution’s own website. Use the search facilities on YouTube to find it (or Google for it  – and thanks Rachel for the tip about Piwik analytics, which I’ll check out).

2. The license thing. https://itunesu.itunes.apple.com/help/#ituF804D079-FF35-422A-A284-A1990BB3751C explains that an iTunesU license covers the course-related elements (the structure, essentially). The individual resources retain their original licensing. This is kinda obvious but also confusing, and is why you probably need to do step 1. Good institutions like Oxford University actually create collections of all their cc: material, but there is no easy way I’ve found to search for “all cc” on iTunesU if an institution didn’t tag the material as such.

3. You can create links to specific points in YouTube video or audio. Bernie Goldbach explains it here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/bern-ie-goldbach/jumping-directly-to-a-youtube-segment/10150329266227228 but bottom line, add the t parameter such as #t=3m45s to the end of the YouTube URL. Obviously you still have to instruct the learners what duration they might like to watch…

Another NB After a file has been uploaded into iTunes U, its meta-data cannot be edited.

OR… you could just tell the learners which bits of the iTunes course to watch… 🙂

Imogen

[Helen Crump]

I too liked your post Imogen, and the discussion that it elicited. In fact, I used it as the nub of my reflections for my blog post this week. Apologies that I didn’t join the conversation here, or comment sooner; I think I’m operating at a more superficial level when it comes to this topic. Great job. Thanks.

Make it personal, keep it simple: finding and creating resources. #octel

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