Apple, State of Texas Launch iTunes Texas Education Channel

Apple’s (News - Alert) iTunes store is about more than sheer entertainment for students in the Lone Star state. The online resource serves as a source for downloadable multimedia lessons, podcasts and videos, according to a report on the matter.

The statewide effort, called The Texas Education iTunes U channel, lets teachers upload class materials that students and parents later can access via home or school computers or iPods. Content from PBS, the Smithsonian Institution and the National Archives are also available on the channel.

This program stemmed from talks that started between Apple Inc. and the state of Texas about three years ago. Today, 146,000 teachers have registered for the program and formed 5,000 subject groups. And additional state agencies are expected to come aboard the program in the future.

As discussed in the February issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine, a TMC (News - Alert) publication, this is not the first example of how Texas educators have leveraged Apple technology in the learning process. A 4,800-student institution about 180 miles outside of Dallas called Abilene Christian University has been working with Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) to enable a variety of new alert, conferencing and collaboration, document sharing, identification, payment, and polling capabilities. These applications are available to students, staff and/or visitors of the school via university-provided iPhone (News - Alert) and iPod Touch devices.

“Mobility is going to be big,” says David Puglia, CTO of the enterprise business at Alcatel-Lucent, describing the ACU deployment as a key example on this front. “It is big, and it’s going to be huge.”

The university has been an Alcatel-Lucent customer since 2001, and virtually its entire network is based on the vendor’s solutions, whether you’re looking at the IP PBX (News - Alert); the wireless LAN, which includes nearly 500 access points; application enablement; data infrastructure; conferencing and collaboration tools; or security, says Fernando Egea, direction of solution architecture for Alcatel-Lucent’s enterprise group.

ACU recently decided it wanted to take its communications capabilities to the next level in an effort to improve enrollment and retention, and to support its goal of positioning itself as a premier global university. Given 90 percent of Generation Y students already use cell phones and laptops, decision-makers at the school realized popular electronic devices could be ideal mechanisms for university outreach and student support. So it launched the mobile learning initiative.

A video at http://enterprise.alcatel-lucent.com/docs/?id=10532 promoting the program demonstrates how students can use the Apple devices to discover what books they’ll need for various classes; access a campus map and calendar; and receive ACU Alerts on a range of topics, such as notices about coming thunderstorms, for example. The program, through which the college provides the devices and the students pay the monthly connectivity fees, also enables students to choose between taking classes in the traditional way, and attending classes just once a week and using their iPhone or iPod Touch devices to access the other necessary information, which starting this year will be offered on demand.

The effort at ACU also encourages student engagement by enabling class members to post links related to curriculum and discussions to class websites. And a feature called NANO, for no advanced notice, lets ACU teachers project multiple choice tests on white boards, to which students can respond via their mobile devices, and the response is immediately projected onto the white board. That means less lag time for students to see the results, and less time grading papers for the teachers, notes Egea.