Content Delivery - The iPad

One of the principal aims of iTutorus is to enable students to access teaching and learning materials utilising innovative technologies, media and new ideas. 

Making the content easily accessible and within an exciting format was and is very important to how this project has been conceived. 

Following our extensive research and citing: ease of use, portability and interactiveness, in this post we will focus on delivering content through the iPad.

There are many benefits that the iPad has over standard video and interactive delivery methods. 

Unlike a desktop PC, due to their portability, the student can interact with the content in any location they wish - in work rooms, in a classroom or at home. They are better at performing general usage tasks and are far superior in playing HD video than cheap laptops and are generally much better value than mid range units. 

The iPad also provides a more tactile and responsive user interface than full featured computers.

Having settled on the device, its also important to consider how the content is accessed. There are three ways of delivering video content on the iPad.

• Using the standard ‘Movies’ App

This involves loading videos through iTunes. The user is presented with a simple list of videos available to play. 

• Hosting the videos on a website, using the Safari browser to access the content

A webapp would need to be created to host the video in an attractive and accessible way. This would provide much more functionality than simply using the Movies app, however, the downside would be speed of access - having to wait for web pages to download.

• Building an application from scratch

Apple provides a free SDK (Software Development Kit) to build apps for the iPad. These can include all types of media, including video. 

In order to install apps, the developer is required to sign up for a software developer program, but these provide a range of ways to install applications on the device. The major benefit of this option is it allow for very customised and responsive interaction with the device.

It is this latter option that we feel to be the most significant. We have developed our own application for the device. It allows students to select a lesson, then interact with the video and a PDF file that accompanies the lesson.

On the right of the screen, in horizontal view, there is a list of available lessons.

Top left is a video of the lesson.

Bottom left is a PDF version of that lesson.