Anystream has announced that the latest release of their Apreso products for higher education is the world’s first lecture capture technology to integrate with iTunes U. The integration is a result of a partnership with Apreso customer and iTunes U partner The George Washington University (GW).

“Automation is highly valuable in higher education because it facilitates the adoption of teaching and learning technologies,” said John Arpino, GW academic technologies’ senior programmer analyst and project manager for the iTunes U/Apreso initiative. “By integrating with iTunes U, Anystream best serves the needs of both faculty and their students.”

This fall GW equipped six classrooms with Apreso Podcast to automatically capture lecture content and instantly convert it into podcasts playable on iPods and from within iTunes U. GW was the first institution to develop an automated content upload mechanism for the portal. Using this integration, Apreso lecture podcasts are automatically published to GW’s iTunes U site for immediate student review.

“We wanted a solution that required no special tasks from our instructors. We chose Apreso because it automatically creates content to feed our system,” said Arpino. “The initiative has been quickly adopted because students are familiar with the iTunes U interface and Apreso allows professors to focus on teaching rather than podcasting.”

GW’s iTunes U site received more than 1,800 student visits within three weeks of going live. Based on this success, Anystream and GW teamed to integrate this functionality into the Apreso product line to extend automated podcast publishing to any iTunes U and Apreso institution.

“The feedback has been fantastic,” said Arpino. “We are podcasting a diverse set of courses but it seems to be especially helpful to students taking larger classes. Apreso offers students additional access to course information that reinforces their classroom experience. We plan on including this functionality in eight more classrooms for the spring semester.”

In addition to their iTunes U/Apreso initiative, The George Washington University is the first Apreso customer to deploy Apreso’s enhanced podcasting support. Enhanced podcasting enriches the playback experience by enabling students to navigate podcasts via synchronized course visuals.