Podagogy

Back in January I posted an entry titled “The Potential & Dissapointment of iTunes U“. My greatest disappointment was the fact we could not reliably upload any file with a size greater than 100Mb. Often it took 2, 3, 4, or more attempts to successfully upload a larger audio or video file. In one case it took us 3 weeks of trying to upload a large video.

Recently, Apple updated the iTunes U backend providing new functionality and flexibility. Yesterday I decided to test the “new & improved” version of iTunes U by uploading the video file that took us 3 weeks to load. Call me jaded. Call me skeptical. But, I did not expect it to work. No one was more surprised than I to find the file actually uploaded successfully on the first try. No “time out” errors, no error of any kind.

So after a year and a half of investing, configuring, tweaking, and a lot of hair pulling, perhaps we have turned a corner. Don’t remind me that Apple iTunes U forum experts assured us there was no problem on their end. Don’t remind me that we invested heavily in an end-to-end Apple solution to get reliable uploads to iTunes U. I will be doing additional tests to see if my first success was a statistical outlier. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Apple’s upgrade of iTunes U has finally addressed a critical reliability issue. I’ll let you know the results of further testing.