Oxbridge offers lecture podcasts in a bid to make them more accessible to people across the worldLONDON: If you wanted to hear lectures by Noble prize-winning thinkers you often had to attend elite academic institutions like Oxford and Cambridge universities. Not any more!
Starting Tuesday both the top British universities have launched a service that allows lectures, videos and podcasts to be downloaded from the iTunes web site. The aim is to make the elite institutions more accessible to people across the world.
A spokeswoman for Cambridge University said the idea was to “lift the veil” on the university using iTunes to put lectures and talks from its experts into the public domain. Using the tag line “world-leading experts” Cambridge is making more than 300 podcasts available for free download. “Celebrity historian David Starkey features in a podcast about the history of the university”, said the spokeswoman.
Other highlights include interviews with some of Cambridge’s Nobel prize winners and an exploration of the university’s code-breaking efforts during World War II. Material from Chris Smith, whose award-winning programme The Naked Scientist draws a weekly radio audience of millions will also feature.
Oxford University on the other hand says it will offer 150 hours of video and audio material of lectures and ideas from “world-leading thinkers”. Among the contributions will be Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, discussing the global financial crisis, Craig Venter on genomics, and Sir Nicholas Stern on the economics of climate change.
“We hope that this service will make Oxford’s diverse range of audio and video material more widely accessible to applicants, alumni, supporters of the University, and the intellectually curious,” said John Hood, vice-chancellor of Oxford.
The Oxbridge universities are the latest recruits to a growing trend among universities in the UK that are setting up downloading services within the iTunes U education area — including University College London and the Open University. All the content is playable on a Mac or PC with iTunes and can be used on an iPod and iPhone. The material will be available 24 hours a day. The address for Cambridge is
www.cam.ac.uk/itunesu and for Oxford, it is http://itunes.ox.ac.uk.
