All They Need Now is a Football Team – iTunes U Passes Big Milestone
According to technology blog CNET, the educational content wing of Apple’s iTunes Music site, iTunes University, passed a milestone of over 100 million downloads this week. iTunes University is part of a mobile learning and content distribution service available through Apple’s iTunes application. As stated by Apple on their mobile learning site:
“Today’s students expect constant access to information—in the classroom and beyond. Which is why more and more faculty are using iTunes U to distribute digital lessons to their students. And now, with the 3.0 software update for iPhone and iPod touch, iTunes U is directly accessible over both cellular and Wi-Fi networks through the iTunes Store.”
Interestingly, according to CNET, one of the most popular draws on iTunes University’s bandwidth is the much esteemed Open University (OU) in the UK that had earlier tried and failed to launch an American campus in the late 1990s. A brief report of the OU’s foray into the American educational market is provided here.
The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter in the United Kingdom but operates internationally. According to its web site the OU serves over 150,000 undergraduate and 30,000 postgraduate students. 25,000 are outside the UK. It is generally considered “the world’s first successful distance teaching university” and the United Kingdom’s only university dedicated to distance learning.
The iTunes University download service is popular among many other universities as well. Contributors include: Stanford University, Princeton, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. A partial (and growing) list of schools providing content can be found here. Given it s recent growth and overall wide acceptance, iTunes University appears to have become a standard tool for distribution of audio and video content among American colleges and universities.