iTunes Ual ?

More and more universities seem to be promoting and joining iTunes U, YouTube or Vimeo etc, few have their own in-house video repositories and are using iTunes U, YouTube or Vimeo etc as their primary video repository, is this good practice or is it even a consideration?  Maybe before jumping into iTunes U, colleges really need to have a plan/strategy for how it manages its internal video production and how it archives/makes available and licenses video it produces. Colleges, or specifically at UAL we really need to establish a unified cross college systems for regular video production and archiving, then they can select from their own video archive pot the ‘best/most appropriate’ videos to feed through to commercial channels in specific contexts like iTunes (learning videos, marketing etc), YouTube etc.

Many institutions don’t have the ‘foresight’ to create their own in-house open online video archive/platforms so have to rely solely on external commercial channels like iTunes as their primary platform or video archive, this could present problems in the future.

Commercial media channels really should be secondary channels not primary. I’m a big fan of commercial channels but I don’t think colleges should be putting all its eggs into one commercial basket, all videos produced by the institution should be made available and accessible at all times to everyone and be free from commercial fees, conditions and advertising.

If institutions have their own in-house video archive and learning networks they could directly benefit from the communities built around them. In-house and externally hosted archives can also be mutually beneficial, and if sometime in the future the institution wants to withdraw from a commercial platform they can without fear of being too tied into one host and losing that all important community.

Also see - Have we the right balance between open education and commercial social media?

Ual have been exploring these issues over the past few years, http://process.arts.ac.uk/ is a good example of video archived and available for download direct, uploaded and stored on its in-house platform by the site users themselves - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/life-drawing-laurence-noga-wimbledon-foundation-201011 these videos build up a local and interest/subject specific community of its own, Video is also successfully filtering into YouTube as a secondary channel http://www.youtube.com/user/ProcessArts/videos?sort=p&view=0 these attract a different, larger and wider audience.

Chris Follows (http://process.arts.ac.uk/users/cfollows )

For more reflections on open educational practice please see - http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/project-groups/score

Also see 'Creating guidelines for learning videos' - http://learningvideoguidelines.myblog.arts.ac.uk/