This storm in a teacup fear mongering stuff has to stop.
It's silly to suggest this is locking in content, or even bad for anyone, and it's obvious why they use this distribution method over hosting the content themselves.
1. It's not in a proprietary format, the documents are PDF, the videos are AAC/H264. (I give up the h264 debate for today). Having to run iTunes to access the store is hardly "lock in". You might as well suggest turning on your computer is lock in.
2. This is on a CDN managed externally, Harvard don't need to invest in data centers.
3. Harvard don't have to pay for hosting/transmission/upkeep costs.
4. It enables harvard to provide something for free when normally they'd need to allocate budget. (And with that possibly charge for it.)
5. It's part of iTunes U, which is praised by universities across the globe for being an excellent enabler of education.
As posted in my other comment - I'm currently at the airport with my android, and no way to get this content. If it's not locked in, how do I access the data?
When I get home I'll have to install itunes. Which will add the apple updater + bonjour to my system as well.
2-4)
I agree completely with your arguments regarding the benefits to Harvard. You're saying the same thing in three different ways though, Harvard has no costs hosting this content, which is true
5)
The big enablers of education that have entered my field of view are MIT opencourseware, khan academy and the recent stanford courses. Perhaps iTunesU is among them, but I haven't seen this praise in my feeds.
There's software for desktop Linux that lets you access iTunes U, so I don't think there is anything stopping Android from being able to as well apart from developers' motivations.
Podcasting distribution and aggregation is a problem that is already solved really well in the OSS space; there doesn't seem to be a compelling need to adopt proprietary solutions. Harvard isn't a strappy startup with no funds available to it. I'm pretty sure they have oodles of bandwidth and compute power at their disposal.
I don't think they shouldn't use iTunes U, that's fine, but I wish they made it available through alternate channels as well.
1. It's not in a proprietary format, the documents are PDF, the videos are AAC/H264. (I give up the h264 debate for today). Having to run iTunes to access the store is hardly "lock in". You might as well suggest turning on your computer is lock in.
2. This is on a CDN managed externally, Harvard don't need to invest in data centers.
3. Harvard don't have to pay for hosting/transmission/upkeep costs.
4. It enables harvard to provide something for free when normally they'd need to allocate budget. (And with that possibly charge for it.)
5. It's part of iTunes U, which is praised by universities across the globe for being an excellent enabler of education.