In the second half of Apple's education-focused media event today, the company turned its attention to iTunes U, the company's free educational podcast section in the iTunes Store. Eddy Cue took the stage to announce that over 1,000 universities are currently using iTunes U, with the program's content having seen over 700 million downloads to date.
The new iTunes U app advances iTunes U from audio and video lectures to a full-fledged learning app, allowing non-traditional students access to huge amounts of free content but more importantly for Apple, allowing schools to adopt iTunes U as a learning platform.
The all-new iTunes U app lets teachers create and manage courses including essential components such as lectures, assignments, books, quizzes and syllabuses and offer them to millions of iOS users around the world.
Courses are created via the iTunes U Course Manager, a web-based tool that allows teachers to build a course that includes a syllabus, handouts, quizzes, and other items. Course materials are hosted by Apple and available to anyone taking the course -- by default, courses are open and available to anyone, though it appears schools can restrict their courses to only their students.
For users, iTunes U for iOS has more than 100 courses already optimized for iOS, with more on the way. A quick perusal of the app shows classes from Yale, Duke, MIT, and Stanford -- including Paul Hegarty's well-regarded iPad and iPhone App Development course [Direct Link].
iTunes U lets you take a complete course on your iPad. View the course overview, instructor biography, and course outline. Read posts and keep track of your completed assignments. Watch videos directly within the app, read books, and view all your course notes in one place. Receive push notifications alerting you to new posts from the instructor. And iCloud keeps your notes, highlights, and bookmarks up to date on all your devices.
iTunes U is a free download for iPad and iPhone on the App Store [Direct Link].
Top Rated Comments
Huh? It's giving free courses from places like Stanford, and those courses are hardly "small." Many people can't afford $120k to go to college, and this helps everyone access information. If that's not an impact then I don't know what is.
They have a very successful platform already.
It is device and OS independent. Converting it to this platform would be going backwards.
There are millions upon millions of parents who spend billions upon billions on their kids every year...there is plenty of room for an ipad or two in those billions...
Life is full of distractions...beside, many of those "distractions" you're referring to can be disabled or limited on an ipad....I know, I know that would require parental involvement...but that's another topic altogether...
Have you ever participated in post-secondary education? Taken quizzes, tried to organize 15 credits worth of courses notes in a tablet notebook or annoyiyng tack folders? Forgot your one piece of notes, or had them unorganized? Well, if this was around when i was in college, I can bet I'd have been a better student. Maybe its just me?
And in wealthy private schools? It would benefit large public schools, such as Penn State where i attended, and they needed 2-3 teacher's assistance just to pass out the notes, quizzes, study guides etc to the 300-400 kids in a single class.
Well ... I am a graduate of a top Business School and 2 top Engineering schools. I have used Blackboard and several other tools. 1 Blackboard was not quite hardware / software agnostic. Very broken unless you were running IE (at least 4 yrs ago).
At the end of the day you will need to buy some piece of hardware to get either Blackboard or iTunes U working. Apple is giving you an education experience, not a piece-mealed set of "things". I was a teaching assistant in undergrad and this experience Apple is setting up makes the process A LOT simpler to manage. For K-12, my partner is a teacher and his jaw dropped watching the video last night. You can write grants to get iPads in the classroom. In some schools there are stipends provided to have "computers" for students in classrooms (Title 1 Schools). Private schools of course can include it in tuition.
Someone already said it and I think they are correct. Apple will aggressively price the iPad 2 just like they did the iPhone 4 and create a 2nd tier of product without sacrificing the experience.
I'm confused as to why everyone is complaining about an iPad in every classroom. Microsoft wanted a PC in every classroom (and just about got it). Apple is just doing it better.
I hope Chazwatson doesn't read this. He might go off on another one of his looking down isn't ergonomic spiels.