Podagogy

When Spring Arbor University received notice that it would be among the early users of iTunes U we were ecstatic. We considered it a privilege to be included with the “big” universities, in the early days of iTunes U. The fact is, we still consider it a privilege and are thankful for the resource Apple, Inc. has provided in the iTunes U system. However, all is not well in Camelot.

The availability of large storage capacity and big pipes is certain to make any ed tech person salivate. Provide all that for free and the ed tech person is likely to swoon with joy. So, what could tarnish such a delightful prospect? Simply put – reliability.

In the early stages of our iTunes U experiences we dealt primarily with digital audio. Of course, digital video came into play very quickly, and we were beaming with pride at the rich media we could now provide to students. Within 6 months video clips began to outnumber audio clips, and faculty began to create their own video stuff. We discovered quickly that video clips larger than 150-200Mb took multiple tries to upload. After 12 months we were discouraged by the common failure of most videos over 100Mb to upload at all.

Our network gurus, systems gurus, and in-house Apple gurus poked, prodded, and sniffed everywhere in our systems to find the noxious little clog that we were certain must be causing our migraines. Surprise! There was not “noxious little clog”. There was no problem at found at all. We even reserved bandwidth for traffic to iTunes U. We participated in the discussion about this phenomenon on the Apple iTunes U discussion forums and took some small comfort that we were not alone. Unfortunately, Apple, Inc. was not able to identify anything on their end that would address the problem. Two years later, the best way to describe my attitude about iTunes U is the title of a classic B. B. King hit – ‘The Thrill is Gone”.

To date, we have invested in Apple servers, Podcast Producer, Woolamaloo (an administrative front-end for iTunes U), yadda, yadda, yadda, with no improvement in reliability of file uploading. We have spent tens of thousands of dollars without seeing any significant improvement in upload success rate. Oy!

If we had other options (big storage, fat pipes, CHEAP) we would give it a shot. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a host that doesn’t kill you with bandwidth, or storage charges. We labor on with the hope one day iTunes U will (for us) live up to its potential as an enterprise platform. For now, we just mumble and try uploading again.