Carlos Matthew Palacio, a News Service intern majoring in technocultural studies, created this promotional video.
Navigating copyright
Jan Carmikle gives us the straight scoop on how to deal with copyright law, whether we are producing videos or audio recordings. [ more… ]
It’s easy to do
UC Davis has made it easy and straightforward to upload your video and audio files. Just follow these steps. [ more… ]
Campus community can upload multimedia to Apple site
With the debut of the new iTunes U site, faculty, staff and students are invited to join the multimedia fun by adding campus-related video and audio files to the site.
The Apple site, as well instructions on how to participate, can be reached through the UC Davis on iTunes U site.
UC Davis is among the first 52 colleges and universities nationwide — and the second UC campus, following UC Berkeley — to establish a free iTunes U site. The site is located within Apple’s iTunes Store.
“This project gives UC Davis a great opportunity to take advantage of free, existing technology and to help a vast audience come to know more about our programs and academic strengths,” said Lisa Lapin, assistant vice chancellor for University Communications.
The new UC Davis site’s relatively young audience includes many of the campus’s prospective and incoming students who expect to be able to find UC Davis in all of the places they frequent online, Lapin added.
She hopes that the site will draw audiences beyond those familiar with iTunes, to newcomers who will realize how simple it is to use the technology once they try it.
‘This project gives UC Davis a great opportunity to … help a vast audience come to know more about our programs and academic strengths.’
Lisa Lapin, assistant vice chancellor for University Communications
Special invitation to faculty
UC Davis faculty members interested in reaching a broader constituency are especially encouraged to put courses online. Thanks to iTunes U, campuses such as MIT and UC Berkeley are receiving national recognition for having college courses in the public arena.
Bernd Hamann, a professor of computer science, is UC Davis’ first faculty member to put a course, “Advanced Visualization (ECS277),” on the site.
He sees a great marketing potential for UC Davis faculty, since many students from other universities and countries may be impressed by the lectures when deciding on a university to attend for graduate studies.
“The public forum for such recorded materials is really the entire world, or at least a very large fraction of the entire world,” Hamann said. “Reaching a global audience in this way is also reflecting positively on a public and globally interested and concerned university like UC Davis.”
Project partners University Communications and Information and Educational Technology–Academic Technology Services first began planning the site in May 2007, prompted by an agreement reached that spring between the University of California and Apple, which has a number of educational partnerships with the university. Apple launched iTunes U that same month.
Under the agreement, UC campuses develop their own site and upload files for free onto the Apple server, to be accessed at no cost to the public. Each campus is responsible for all content placed in iTunes U, including issues related to copyright.
Paying attention to copyright
Campus contributors will need to pay close attention to the burgeoning issue of copyright infringement, according to Jan Carmikle, the campus’s intellectual property licensing officer.
“Everyone has to follow federal copyright law,” she says. “Copyright law says one must have a license to exercise copyrights to someone else’s ‘original work of authorship’ unless there is an exception spelled out in law.” (To learn more on copyright issues, read the accompanying story.)
Throughout the past six months, University Communications has developed content policy and procedures, with considerable assistance from Carmikle.
In the meantime, IET–Academic Technology Services has created a sophisticated software program that provides a free automatic online uploading process for certain common file formats.
“It is IET’s goal to provide our faculty, students, staff and visitors with easy access to UC Davis’ high-quality audio and video recordings that are both of immediate interest and long-lasting value,” said Elizabeth Gibson, director of IET–Academic Technology Services.
‘Reaching a global audience in this way is also reflecting positively on a public and globally interested and concerned university like UC Davis.’
Bernd Hamann, professor of computer science
Already 50 videos on the site
For the UC Davis launch, the site has been populated with nearly 50 video files, mostly developed by University Communications’ Broadcast Unit.
Also included are speakers’ series produced by IET–Academic Technology Services’ Media Services Unit as well as Frontiers, a 30-minute-long public affairs TV interview program jointly produced by University Communications and Academic Technology Services.
The site includes longer news features, such as the 2005 Farm vs. Farm video, which recounts UC Davis’ upset of Stanford in football; a profile of UC Davis teaching prize winner Zuhair Munir; the campus’s “Sustaining UC Davis” video on campus sustainability; and TV host Huell Howser’s tour of UC Davis, Road Trip: UC Davis.
The site also features many brief NewsWatch segments about UC Davis, including our campus olive oil production, the future of plug-in hybrid vehicles, and a historian’s insights into Buffalo Bill and his era.
Some content restricted to campus
Most of the iTunes content is available to anyone, but some is restricted to the campus community. That restricted content is available only with a university password by clicking on “Campus Users” in the Quick Links box on the UC Davis page in iTunes U.
Examples include podcasts of academic courses in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
The great majority of UC Davis academic courses being recorded as podcasts are available through a separate IET system. Students and faculty interested in academic course podcasts should visit IET’s Podcasting at UC Davis.
UC Davis is moving in other Web-based directions, too. The campus recently launched its own Facebook fan page and University Communications is currently developing its own YouTube page, to debut in the next several weeks.