I had some spare time the other day, so I opened up iTunes and went to the iTunes Store fore a quick look to see what it may have of interest. I spotted a section of the store that I had heard about, but to which I had not paid much attention, iTunes University. To my amazement, the iTunes U department had course and lecture offerings from some of the world’s top institutions of higher learning. Among the schools represented: MIT, Oxford, Cambridg, Stanford, Duke, and my own alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley.
The University section of the store included materials covering fields as disparate as the arts and political science, physics and foreign languages (although, I have heard some people say that physics is a foreign language to them). I also found courses on history, mathematics, philosophy, literature, education and rhetoric. Stanford and Cornell even offered courses on Law.
The store has broken the offerings into thirteen general categories to facilitate finding what you seek. The chosen categories: ”Business”, “Engineering”, “Fine Arts”, “Health & Medicine”, “History”, “Humanities”, “Language”, “Literature”, “Mathematics”, “Science”, “Social Science”, “Society” and “Teaching & Education”.
All of the courses I looked had were of recent vintages and none of the schools charged for their offerings. Acquiring a course took little effort, simply clicking on it and telling it to download to iTunes. Once in iTunes, you had the option of playing it on a computer or synching it to an iPhone/iPod. The store offers another very convenient feature; it allows you to download the entire course or selected lectures from the course. Some of the courses continue to grow in terms of material and lectures. The University allows you to subscribe to the course, so that iTunes can automatically download any new material for your use and enjoyment.
If you have not yet seen the iTunes U section of the iTunes Store, you should do so ASAP. Download a few courses and learn something new. Expand your horizons!
