Apple’s iTunes U Course Manager is a web-based tool
that allows instructors to create “courses” that can be downloaded and synced
to the iTunes U iPad app. That could be a very big deal for higher education if
the platform can jump a couple of pretty big hurdles, according to Joshua Kim
in a Technology and Learning blog post.
Courses created in the platform can include documents,
audio, and video files, which can be read on whatever iPad app a student
chooses. The information can be viewed both online and offline, provides
additional features that allow students to create and share study notes, and enables
course materials to be delivered to students without going through a
third-party publishing platform.
The biggest obstacle to making this work on any scale
is also the most obvious: Students have to be hooked into an iOS device,
preferably an iPad. The student experience on an iPad is great, according to
Kim, but those students without Apple devices are out of luck.
Another concern for Kim is students will have to go
outside the Apple setting at some point because the platform separates content
for iOS devices from the creation of blogs and discussion boards that appear on
learning management systems.
“Despite these challenges, I see the evolving Course
Manager and iTunes U Courses as a compelling development,” Kim writes. “We have
struggled to find a robust way to deliver a combination of text and multimedia
curricular content that is organized around a course narrative to mobile
devices. Apple seems to be offering us, or at least those of us in the Apple
universe, a solution.”
