Apple has incorporated learning into their music store. iTunes U provides iOS users with free education.
According to WhatIs.com, iTunes U features educational audio and video files from several universities, museums and public media organizations. Users can download these files to their PCs and mobile devices.
iTunes U gives visitors the ability to search, download as well as play shows and movies. Institutions that are already in the program are Standford, UC Berkeley, University of Melbourne, Texas A&M, MIT, Yale and Trinity College Dublin, among others. Another section in iTunes U is the Beyond Campus section that includes content from American Public Media, PBS, the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian.
The iTunes U app is also available for the iPhone and iPad. It "provides everything an instructor needs to bring the classroom together on iPad - build lessons with apps and your own materials, collect and grade assignments from students, discuss one-to-one or in groups, and annotate PDF assignments."
The app requires an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch with iOS version 8.3 or later. iTunes 12 or later is needed for users to be able to sync to a computer.
Mac World noted that iTunes U has featured sections for courses on Art & Architecture, Business, Engineering, Health & Medicine and Literature, among others. There are also courses on several languages.
The app's content is diverse in its file types as well. There are audio and video lectures as well as PDFs and ePub files. Users can watch videos or listen to audio lectures directly by clicking on a link on the course page. To download content, users need to subscribe first.
Last June, Apple has expanded cloud support for iTunes U. 9to5 Mac reported that the app now has a document picker that supports cloud services from iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive and Box.
Additional updates include the feature that allows users to import managed class rosters from Apple Manager, using Explain Everything and Notability project files as course materials or hand-ins from students. There were also minor performance and stability improvements in the update.
