Setting up iTunesU albums for Case’s Courseware

We will have a Google Doc created for the current semesters courseware classes (spring 2010). Open or create this document.

Open Case’s Registrar page and search on a course that we will be creating an album for. We will copy data from here and paste it into our Google Doc.

The information we will need is for the following categories: Courseware Name, Course Registration Number (CRN), days of the week that the class takes place, the time of the class, location (building and room number), faculty name, faculty Case ID, title of the class, description of the class and then a Special CRN ID (more on obtaining this later in this document).

Perform a Google search on the title of the class to find and image that could represent the class. The dimension of the album art is 300 x 300 pixels at 72 ppi. The image that we are searching for has to be larger than the 300 x 300 album size.

Create the album art in Photoshop using one of our templates. The logo should be locked in order to keep its location consistent. Once the image is in place and the title of the class added, save as a PSD then as a JPG. iTunes will not accept PSD files and will lock up the iTunes “Upload Artwork” page.

Launch iTunesU and login. Open the correct semester folder. Select “Edit Page”. Click on the “Create Page” tab. Select from template “Default Course”. Scroll down to find the new page setup. There are three fields to fill out. The first is for the name of the course (ex: CHEM 106). The second field is for a short version of the course (ex: chem106). The third field is for an
Identifier Number, which will fill out later. For now leave it blank.

To close this information fields just click on the “Checkmark”. ITunes will return to the current semester folder and automatically alphabetize the classes. You may have to scroll down to find the new class. The class will have a default blank image.

Click on this image and the album page will open. Click on “Edit Page”. To add the new image, click on the “Up Arrow” on the blank image. This will open a browser page to “Upload Artwork”. Use the Browse button to upload the image for the album. Once the image is loaded, scroll down and click on the “Done” button. You will be taken back to the Class page.

There are two areas for information. To the right of the image is a field for the professor’s name. To enter the text just click on the “Pencil” icon. To close out after entering the text click on the “Checkmark”.

To enter a Description, click on the “Pencil” icon next to Description and copy and paste the text from the Google doc. When finished close it out with the “Checkmark”.

Now we must create an audio tab. Most of our iTunes will be audio only. There are occasions that a video tab may need to be created. For now we will create just an audio tab. By default there are two tabs. Remove one of the two by clicking on the “No” symbol. Then double click the remaining tab and type in “Audio”, then close it by the “Checkmark”.

While remaining in Editing Mode, minimize iTunes a bit. Open another browser window and place it behind the iTunes page so we can see the URL area. We will extract the iTunes Album ID.

* Left Click and hold on the Audio tab and drag it onto the Browser URL area (Firefox) or onto the IE8 top browser bar and release. IE8 will ask for approval.

* A URL will be generated. There will be a long set up numbers at the end of the URL. Copy this number (ex: .3111568770.03111568773). The first period must be included.

* This will be the Extracted ID number for that Album.

* Copy that number onto the Google Doc for our current Semester under the heading “iTunes Album ID”.

We are finished setting up the course album page. Return to the current Semester page in iTunes.

We will now have to extract a Special CRN ID for our class. First we must launch MediaVision’s Courseware home page. Login with our Case ID and password. Using the pull down menu, find the current class and open it. Then look for the current video. Scroll down select “Tools and Settings”. Find “What is the direct link to this class”. Double click on the link and cursor to the
far right. There will be a nine digit number that starts with 2 zeros (ex: 001652101). This will be our Special CRN code. Copy the entire number including the zeros and paste it into our Google doc under the heading Special CRN.

Return to the Case iTunes U site. Inside the current semester folder, find the Class that we just created. Click on the Pencil icon. Under the Identifier field, copy in the Special CRN code. This will point to our audio file.

Well, that’s about it folks.

DJ