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Â鶹appÈë¿Ú has launched its own iTunes U site that features free access to audio and video files on campus news, faculty research, interviews, music, athletics and academic courses.

The Apple Inc.-hosted site can be reached through the Â鶹appÈë¿Ú portal at . Apple began promoting the Â鶹appÈë¿Ú site on its main iTunes U site beginning today.

Â鶹appÈë¿Ú is among the first 52 colleges and universities nationwide -- and the second UC campus, following UC Berkeley -- to establish a free iTunes U site within the company's iTunes Store.

"This project gives Â鶹appÈë¿Ú 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 audience for Â鶹appÈë¿Ú on iTunes U includes many of the campus's prospective and incoming students who expect to be able to find Â鶹appÈë¿Ú in all of the places they frequent online, Lapin added.

Members of the campus community are now being urged to not only be iTunes U users but contributors, too. They can begin putting media recordings up on Â鶹appÈë¿Ú on iTunes U by following directions offered on the Â鶹appÈë¿Ú portal .

"It is IET's goal to provide our faculty, students, staff and visitors with easy access to Â鶹appÈë¿Ú' high-quality audio and video recordings that are both of immediate interest and long-lasting value," said Elizabeth Gibson, director of Information and Educational Technology-Academic Technology Services.

For the Â鶹appÈë¿Ú on iTunes U launch, the site has been populated with nearly 50 videos, 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.

Â鶹appÈë¿Ú on iTunes U also includes longer news features, such as the 2005 "Farm vs. Farm" video, which recounts Â鶹appÈë¿Ú' upset of Stanford in football; a profile of Â鶹appÈë¿Ú teaching prize winner Zuhair Munir; the campus's "Sustaining Â鶹appÈë¿Ú" video on campus sustainability; and TV host Huell Howser's tour of Â鶹appÈë¿Ú, "Road Trip: Â鶹appÈë¿Ú." The site also features many brief "NewsWatch" segments about Â鶹appÈë¿Ú, including our campus olive oil production, the future of plug-in hybrid vehicles, and a historian's insights into Buffalo Bill and his era.

Â鶹appÈë¿Ú faculty members are encouraged to add academic courses to Â鶹appÈë¿Ú on iTunes U. Bernd Hamann, a professor of computer science, is the first faculty member to put a course, "Advanced Visualization (ECS277)," on the site.

Windows or Mac OS users can obtain free iTunes software from the iTunes site . They can then download files and play them on an MP3 player, Mac or PC, or burn a copy onto a CD.