Michigan Dental Students Able to View Lectures on iPods
ANN ARBOR, Mich.
University of Michigan dental students who sleep through a lecture can turn to their iPods to catch up on what they missed.
Apple Computers Inc. is giving students at the School of Dentistry access to the lectures free of charge in an MP3 compressed digital data file format on an iTunes Internet site. Students can download them onto their iPods and watch them wherever — and whenever — they want.
“The first thought is that this is fanciful, working out and walking or drinking coffee while listening to a lecture, but it is growing,” says Brock Read, a researcher for the Chronicle of Higher Education. “There are about a dozen universities involved so far.”
Stanford University, Duke University and the University of California, Berkeley are among the universities already offering lectures in an MP3 format. Reed says Drexel University is giving new video iPods to all students.
Some express doubts about the trend.
“My concern is students not taking notes will have a lasting effect on their true mastery of the material,” says Michigan Technological University humanities professor Dr. William A. Kennedy.
Internet access to lectures is nothing new. But the extreme portability that the MP3 format offers is.
