I subscribed to Yale's course on death and dying and a single course icon appeared on my iTunes U bookshelf. If you're going to be interacting at all with Apple's iPad-driven vision of the future of education, odds are your journey will start at iTunes U.Ĭourses are bundled in binders. That may change now-in fact, it looks like Apple's banking on it. Some great content is on iTunes U, but most people probably never used it. For most people, iTunes U lived as an overlooked button on their iPhone's or iPad's iTunes app.

ITunes U started as a collection of free-to-watch video lectures and audio podcasts created by a variety of universities, all available to download on iTunes. That's before I even thought about buying a single book.

I remember my college days fondly: course packets picked up from the local copy shop, stapled lecture notes with the year's lecture breakdown, and the mandatory binder or folder to jam all these papers into. Launch iTunes U, and you're even greeted with a similar wooden bookshelf, albeit in a darker shade. The official iTunes U app announced at today's Apple educational event is a coming out of the closet for iTunes U, in a more profound way than Apple's Newsstand was for magazines and newspapers.

Make new itunes