As to theft: we make students sign a contract that spells out that the college
will bill them at market value for the lost iPod.

As to the iPod filling station: We use an older G4 tower ( a slow one!) that
contains MP3 versions of all of our .mov files from the streaming audio server.
The organization of the files represents more or less the organization of the
streaming server, i.e. a hierarchy of language/textbook, chapter, exercise
number, etc. The files are visible in an iTunes interface with the playlists. We
take an iPod and synchronize it to a particular language or a particular
textbook. All this is done within iTunes.

As to usage: usage has not been as high as expected for reasons stated before.
Most of our users request iPods for athletic trips, weekend trips, etc. A
minority checks iPods out for a ouple of weeks at a time - these are often users
who do not have highspeed internet connection and live off campus.

There is also another aspect to usage here and that is the fact that language
courses here are very intensive  in quarter terms and faculty sticks as much as
possible to a very tight syllabus. So the iPods go to the unexpected, like the
business school student who wants to brush up on Chinese or the medical student
who wants to brush up on Spanish.

Otmar Foelsche