The Works of DANTE - Issue 6

SWITCH makes lectures mobile – as a podcast

University students in Switzerland can now get lectures on their iPods thanks to a new service developed by the Swiss NREN, SWITCH.

 In the course of his practical training period at the NREN, IT student Cristian Garcia from ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) gave SWITCH’s streaming platform podcast capability. This means that lectures that are recorded and distributed with SWITCH’s streaming service can subsequently be listened to and watched on an iPod, or similar player. The service is available free-of-charge to students and lecturers at Swiss universities

Tapping into knowledge from anywhere at any time

Students and professors are able to access this service and a large number of other innovative services thanks to SWITCH’s authentication and authorisation infrastructure (AAI). This gives all the members of the university reliable access to resources and personal data with a single login – irrespective of where they happen to be. In other words, with an AAI login, a student of the University of Zurich can gain secure and reliable access to resources from their home organisation and to their personal data from any university in the country.

You can read the full article and learn more about SWITCH’s work on AAI here: http://www.switch.ch/about/news-archive.html?id=122

One of the research activities in GÉANT2 is looking at the challenge of deploying AAI’s on a European scale, and how to interconnect already established AAI’s like the one developed by SWITCH. The “EduGAIN“ architecture has been designed to meet this challenge and enable seamless sharing of e-science resources across the continent.

With thanks to SWITCH for reproduction of parts of this article.