Exclusive material featuring best-selling children’s author Jacqueline Wilson and acclaimed writer Alain de Botton are now available free through the University of Warwick’s new site on iTunes U.

Launching today, Warwick on iTunes U features hundreds of audio and video tracks covering a wide range of topics and interests.

Warwick is the first university in the West Midlands to establish an iTunes U service. Lectures and talks from the archive of the last 10 years of the Writers at Warwick programme are some of the compelling audio and video tracks now on iTunes U, a dedicated area within the iTunes Store featuring free educational content. As well as talks by Jacqueline Wilson and Alain de Botton, there is also audio material from Chocolat author Joanna Harris and playwright and author Michael Frayn.

Warwick on iTunes U, available at http://itunes.warwick.ac.uk, provides free access to more than 350 films and podcasts produced with academic staff and students.

Content for the site covers a wide range of subjects including history, maths, arts and culture and science. Popular science fiction writer and Warwick mathematician Ian Stewart has contributed to a series of short math challenges films. Some of the latest work by poet and Director of the University’s Warwick Writing Programme David Morley is also featured.

Warwick on iTunes U will also include student-generated content, starting with a series of films from undergraduate students in Chemistry.

Over the next few months material from the newly-launched £50,000 Warwick Prize for Writing will be added to Warwick on iTunes U. This award will be given biennially for an excellent and substantial piece of writing in the English language. The first Prize will be handed out in 2009 and award-winning writer China Miéville is chairing the judging panel.

Professor Nigel Thrift, Vice Chancellor of the University of Warwick said:

iTunes U is an important resource for the University allowing us to share our outstanding academic research and teaching community with learners and academics worldwide. Warwick has always prided itself on the interplay between staff and students, research and teaching, academics, policy makers and the work place, the interdisciplinary environment in which new ideas and enquiries flourish and iTunes U is an important way for us to bring new communities of interest into the academic conversation.”

The launch of the site is the work of the University’s Warwick Digital Press, a new team established to develop digital media content in collaboration with the University’s academics. Working with elearning, research and academic communities the Warwick Digital Press will regularly add new films and podcasts to Warwick on iTunes U.

Notes to editors
For more information on Warwick on iTunes U, contact: Peter Dunn, Press and Media Relations Manager, University of Warwick, 02476 523708, 07767 655860, p.j.dunn@warwick.ac.uk 

Kelly Parkes-Harrison, Communications Officer, University of Warwick, 02476 574255, 07824 540863, k.e.parkes@warwick.ac.uk