Itunes U - distributing educational content

iTunes U is another means for educational institutions to manage and distribute content to students. Institutions that become members of iTunes U receive access to a site that uses the facilities we already recognise from the Apple’s iTunes Store. Lectures, performances, demonstrations etc can be uploaded for broad dissemination or passord protected for particular classes to use.

Who is using iTunes U? See the Apple site for some examples.

If you have iTunes installed on your computer you can search for some music from the iTunes U channel. For example, you could look for Shostakovich's Festive Overture played by the Oregon State University, subscribe to the Open University's Start Writing Fiction class (audio and text), or listen to weekly 2 minute talks from Texas A & M university on engineering innovations.

There are pros and cons with all this of course. If you want to read some of the arguments you might try Gardner's blog for some discussion about ownership of content, and what Apple's agenda might be in setting up iTunes.