News

Vanderbilt Makes iTunes U App Available on Blackboard Extensions Platform

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 07/29/09

Vanderbilt University Library in Nashville, TN will make its integration for Apple's iTunes U application available to the Blackboard client community, providing a popular tool to other institutions looking to support the use of multimedia content in courses. The integration enables faculty and students to access audio, video, and other multimedia content from iTunes U within their existing courses and with their existing logins through the Blackboard Learn platform.

Vanderbilt has created free, open source access to its recently upgraded iTunes U integration, developed in collaboration with a group of other campuses and consultants from Blackboard and Apple. At Vanderbilt, "public" resources on iTunes U also include campus news, music, sports, and special events. All of the content can be downloaded and played on personal computers as well as mobile devices.

A similar application for iTunes U was developed by The College at Brockport, State University of New York and is freely available to all Angel Learning institutions. (Angel was acquired by Blackboard in May.)

"We found that an increasing number of faculty wanted to use multimedia in their classes--everything from capturing lectures to developing and sharing multimedia presentations for students," said Cindy Franco, online access to knowledge manager at Vanderbilt. "We looked at a number of solutions but they all had limitations. Working with iTunes U gave us an efficient way to share content within our existing system and tied to our courses so faculty and students can use it easily."

The announcement was made at Blackboard's annual conference for users and developers as part of the launch of the company's Extensions Web site. The site provides a central repository of free, paid, and open source applications built by Blackboard developers, institutions, and third parties to extend and enhance the Blackboard platform, as well as digital content and multimedia resources made available by Blackboard's content partners.