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Thanks to Apple, sleeping through an 8 a.m. class doesn't mean missing out on the lecture.

iTunes U, a new application now available to more than 250 colleges and universities across the United States, will be coming to Syracuse University by the end of this year.

The new application allows students to download lectures and other course materials directly to their iPods and MP3 players.

Developed by Apple to give iTunes users access to educational materials from universities, it was initially denied by SU in 2007 because the university planned to develop the technology on its own. However, because of the program's mounting success during the past year, SU decided to organize a team to figure out how to best implement the new application on campus.

"We need to understand how to take advantage of the functionality of it by leveraging it to best reach all of our students," said Anthony Rotolo, an adjunct professor and member of the team looking to bring the technology to campus. "For example, one way to use it is for our online master's degree students who can access course material without being at Syracuse."

Rotolo, an instructional technology manager at the School of Information Studies, is particularly interested in how a program such as iTunes U can be used as a distance learning solution. Currently, the iSchool is the only school on campus to have all of its master's degree material available online, facilitating an education for everyone from graduate students in the working world to soldiers in Iraq.

The developers of iTunes U are looking into how it can be used for students on campus, as well. SU intends to follow the model used by Stanford University, which puts out public material for everyone to access in addition to private, course-related access material available only to students.

"Because of copyright issues, we want to make material available only to members of the university," said Gary McGinnis, director of Information Technology and Services at SU. "If you have a NetID and password, you can sign into iTunes U and access educational material that is on there from your specific course."

In addition to the educational material put out by the university for the public, students will be able to log on to iTunes U and access media for a specific course, the same way students use Blackboard.

iTunes U differs from Blackboard in that students can download a specific lecture or course videos straight to their portable MP3 device, without having to stream it through the Internet.

Many professors at SU already offer this technology through personal podcasting, allowing students to download audio or video files that they post on Blackboard or their personal Web sites.

Some students like Alex Marti, a junior marketing management and supply chain management major, feel that Blackboard is inefficient for digital media.

"My class doesn't go through Blackboard," Marti said. "We go through my teacher's personal Web site because we found that Blackboard was too cumbersome."

He downloaded a lecture podcast for his marketing class because his teacher couldn't attend class.

"I think Blackboard is good for downloading texts, but it would be easier if I could download a podcast straight to my iTunes," he said.

Although SU's iTunes U page has already been set up, it is not yet accessible through the iTunes Store.

However, the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry has taken a different, more proactive approach toward executing iTunes U on its campus.

SUNY-ESF, whose iTunes U page has been active since June, has uploaded various lectures and student presentations onto the site in an effort simply to educate whoever seeks out the information.

"SU can build it and then have the faculty join in," said Paul Otteson, assistant director and web coordinator for the Office of Communications, who is responsible for bringing iTunes U to the SUNY-ESF campus. "Ours needs to be developed and promoted by our faculty in order to get off the ground because we are much smaller," he said.

Otteson said that because his school is so small, it has to put all of its material in the public domain to receive recognition. Some of its material was even featured on Apple's iTunes U homepage, which generated thousands of content downloads by people throughout the country.

Because of intellectual property laws, ESF's strategy has run into problems with publicizing its materials.

"We have a lot of copyrighted content, and much of it we produce and own," said Otteson. "Most presentations fall below the threshold of copyright complaint. If there is a complaint, we simply pull the material and the issue is resolved," he said.

SUNY-ESF professor Charles Hall, who has a full-length video lecture series on the site called "Global Environment and the Evolution of Human Culture," said it is about more than education in the classrooms.

"There is so much on the Internet now that leads young, impressionable minds in the wrong direction," said Hall, a professor of environmental and forest biology. "A program like this is good in the sense that it educates people, not just students, but all people about important issues such as the environment."

While SUNY-ESF initially places general environmental education and other global issues at the forefront of its application for iTunes U, it hopes to eventually expand to the SU model, which will allow students to access materials specific to their courses.

SUNY-ESF freshman conservation biology major Phil Daughton believes a program like iTunes U could be extremely helpful in learning course matter before a test or a lab.

"There are videos on Blackboard that we have to watch for chemistry that show us how to do certain things for labs," Daughton said. "If this was available on my iPod, I would reference it to make sure I knew how to do them before class.