Apple has announced the expansion of iBooks Textbooks and iTunes U Course Manager into additional countries across Asia, Latin America, Europe, and more. With the expansion comes the availability of … Continue reading
Tablets are reinventing how students access and interact with educational material, and how teachers assess and monitor students’ performance at a time when many schools are understaffed and many classrooms overcrowded.
Apple announced a new milestone for its iTunes U online digital education outlet, which has just crossed the 1 billion download mark. Alongside the announcement, Apple has also informed us exclusively that the company has so far sold more than 8 million iPads directly into educational institution worldwide. iTunes U became a standalone app, complete with its own course marketplace and catalog in June 2012.
At the time, iTunes U had served up over 700 million downloads. The additional 300 million downloads mean that the pace of engagement for iTunes U is growing rapidly. iTunes U was introduced in May 2007, meaning that it took the educational product a full five years to rack up just a little over twice that amount. The rapid growth over the last nine months has likely been the result of a combination of factors, including the introduction of the standalone app and an increase in the adoption of iPads in educational settings.
AllThingsD reported earlier that to date, Apple has sold more than 4.5 million iPads to U.S.-based educational institutions, a figure which Apple confirmed to us as correct. Thanks to some clever calculation on the part of 9to5Mac’s Jordan Kahn based on publicly available information, it looks like the vast majority of that number was sold recently, over the past year in fact. Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly stressed how important the education market is in the context of the iPad, and the fact that it’s doing so well with institutional sales both at home and abroad backs that up.
Apple also shared some details about school participation in iTunes U today, noting that more than 1,200 universities and colleges, and over 1,200 K-12 schools host over 2,500 public courses on iTunes U, along with thousands more private courses available only to enrolled students. Some big institutions are embracing iTunes U with particular vigor, Apple notes, including Standford and The Open University, both of which have racked up over 60 million content downloads alone. Some of the more popular individual courses have around 250,000 students enrolled, Apple noted.
Greg noted in a recent article that online education is fast replacing physical colleges, with startups like Coursera reaping many of the benefits. Apple has the advantage of being a very early player in this space, and the ubiquity of its iPad tablet is clearly helping the company add a lot more momentum to its efforts to help institutions embrace online learning.
Apparently, there are people out there who are learning with their iOS devices instead of just browsing the Internet, chatting with friends or wasting countless hours in Pixel People. Apple is announcing today you brainiacs have surpassed one billion iTunes U downloads.
“There are now iTunes U courses with more than 250,000 students enrolled in them, which is a phenomenal shift in the way we teach and learn,” Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue said in a statement.
In total, iTunes U is used in over 1,200 universities and colleges and 1,200 K-12 schools and districts with its hosting of over 2,500 public courses and thousands of private courses. 60 percent of the iTunes U downloads have come from outside of the U.S., Apple says. 155 countries are able to access iTunes U content with educators being able to create iTunes U courses in 30 countries.
The last major milestone iTunes U announced was it hitting 300 million downloads in August 2010. Nearly three years later to achieve 700 million additional downloads is kind of a slow progression, but it’s still an impressive feat as I personally forbid to teach myself anything on my iOS devices.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Apple Censors ‘Barely Legal Teen’ From iCloud Emails, Attachments, Leap Wireless Is Stuck With Heaps Of iPhones In Its Inventory,
Apple’s iTunes U has seen over one billion downloads of free educational content, the company has announced today, with some schools seeing courses with quarter-million registrations and 60m individual downloads. Revealed a little over a year ago, iTunes U offers free educational material and related content from universities, colleges, schools, K-12 districts, and private courses to the iPad.
According to Apple, more than 1,200 universities and colleges are involved, along with 1,200 K-12 schools and districts, and over 2,500 public and private courses are sharing materials through iTunes U. Some of the courses have been incredibly popular: an Ohio State University general chemistry course saw over 100,000 enrolments, for instance, though the system has also allowed more esoteric courses to flourish.
More than 60-percent of the iTunes U app downloads are happening outside of the US, it’s revealed, and there are now over 75,000 educational apps in the App Store, and more than 10,000 Multi-Touch books created with iBooks Author. That free tool, revealed alongside iTunes U last year, allows for the simple creation of interactive textbooks and other content, though they can only be shared in their complete form through Apple’s own stores.
The push to provide more iTunes U content hasn’t been an entirely altruistic one for Apple, which has seen renewed interest in schools and colleges providing iPads for their students. Mansfield Independent School District in Texas, for instance, bought over 10,000 of the tablets, for high school students and faculty.
There’s more on iTunes U in our hands-on, and you can find a preview of the iPad content available here.
Apple’s iTunes U smashes one billion downloads milestone is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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If you didn’t already know that iOS 6 was out in the wild, Apple just delivered a torrent of mobile app updates to make it perfectly clear. Virtually every app that isn’t preloaded now has explicit iOS 6 support to keep it running smoothly, and some of the upgrades are thankfully more than just skin-deep compatibility tweaks. Among the highlights are Podcasts’ new subscription list syncing through iCloud, ringtone creation with GarageBand and iPhoto support for 36.5-megapixel image editing on the latest devices — you know, for that moment you need to tweak Nikon D800 photos on an iPhone 5. We’re including direct links to a few of the juicier updates, but we’d recommend checking AppleInsider‘s comprehensive list to see everything that you’re missing.
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets
Apple updates nearly every app for iOS 6, sneaks in key GarageBand, iPhoto and Podcasts updates originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Sep 2012 18:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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