“Each of Professor Pam Watkins’s 70 podcasts took almost two hours to produce. Then she spent another 100 hours uploading and editing her handouts,” Mitch Smith reports for Inside Higher Ed. “The result is an intermediate algebra course that is one of the first classes in Apple’s new iTunes U library.”
“Apple, which approached a handful of colleges universities last spring to start work on the classes, unveiled its new platform at a Thursday press conference in New York City. Most of the courses — which anyone with a computer, iPad, iPhone or iTouch [sic] can download for free – are posted by major research institutions such as Duke and Yale Universities,” Smith reports. “The six offered by Harrisburg, ranging from differential equations to astronomy, are the only ones from a community college.”
Smith reports, “Unlike previous versions of iTunes U that offered audio and video podcasts but few supplementary materials, the new offerings are more like self-contained courses where students can download handouts and worksheets while following recorded lectures.”
Read more in the full article here.
This is an unbelievably great service from Apple and participating schools. Learning is the key to progress and a good life, and this puts learning in an individual’s hands, for free! THANK YOU Apple & Steve!
The more I learn about Apple’s new textbook ecosystem, the more it becomes breathtaking.
This is a revolutionary step for education and people.
I really like iTunes U. But I’m curious about why colleges are giving their product away for free??
They make the videos available at no cost, but charge tuition when students enroll for credit. “The product” for colleges is credit hour production, not lectures.
See, there is the key. You pay to get the degree, not to learn.
well, one could logically assume that if you’ve paid for a degree, you’ve been learning something…Wolf, have you been in America very long?
Perhaps long enough to learn that a degree does not necessarily imply that learning came with it.
But that’s been true for a long time.
Of course you pay to get the degree, because that’s your ticket to getting a job. The degree represents an economic goal. No one goes to college just to learn. What would be the point?—to frame the diploma on your wall, and sit around all day philosophizing? (I realize that some MDN commenters may fit that description, and it shows in the flow rate of the trough.)
What about the joys of omphaloskepsis?
Well, I wasn’t considering outliers in my very general economic remarks. And year after year, increasingly constrained education budgets have further reduced the numbers of such students.
Homo sapiens loves to learn; it’s the very quality that defines each one of us from day one. Societies however place barriers in the way of this kind of fulfillment. Apple’s plans may get around some of them, I hope.
If I were a University president/chancellor, I wouldn’t charge usurious duplicate degree tuition to a young lady who applied to geology after going through engineering, humanities, mathematics, and physics curricula. I would not frown and say to her, begone! we have a waiting list for your classroom seat! We are weeding out you perpetual students! That happened to someone I know well.
This is quite a while ago (in salad days, when green in judgment) but I went to university purely to learn, without the slightest idea of what to do with it; the idea was to develop analytical thinking skills (as suggested by the topic of the degree) that professional employers were looking for. Back in those days, however, university was FREE in Australia for anyone passing the competitive entrance exams (the gov. even gave you a living allowance to attend). So it was not such an anomaly to go to university to do what you were actually interested in / good at rather than picking courses to maximize your future income (i.e. so you can pay off your debt). A truly liberal education. [The original sense of liberal was ‘suitable for a free man,’ hence ‘suitable for a gentleman’ (one not tied to a trade), surviving in ‘liberal arts’].
You can take an internet course at MIT, but to get a certificate of completion, you have to pay, though I don’t know how expensive or cheap that may be.
I looked at the Intermediate Algebra book. It’s not bad, but I’m not sure that it’s a good interactive version, though. The author’s have more learning to do about interactivity.
On a side note, Apple expects authors to use MathType to typeset math formulas. [$97 retail, $57 academic]. A version of MathType is included in MS Word as “Equation Editor” – the formulas produced by it are acceptable, not really good typographically, though. I can easily spot them in a document. “Equation Editor” seems to work somewhat with iBooks Author.
I’ve used both MathType and Equation Editor for many years and find very little difference in typographical quality. Both afford professional looking formulas embedded in the word-processing document. If saved to web from Word the formulas become referenced gif or png files.
Fortunately, no one uses math any more it’s so last century!
15th?