Apple will be discontinuing iTunes U at the end of 2021, according to a new support document shared by the company today.
Apple has been hard at work building the next generation of apps for both teachers and students:
- Classroom turns your iPad into a powerful teaching assistant, helping teachers guide students through a lesson, see their progress, and keep them on track.
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Schoolwork helps teachers save time and maximize each student’s potential by making it easy for teachers to share class materials, get students to a specific activity in an app, collaborate with students, and view student progress.
In addition to Classroom and Schoolwork, Apple also introduced Apple School Manager to enable IT Administrators to easily manage iPads, Macs, Apple TV, Apple IDs, books, and apps, while ensuring data is kept secure and private. Apps such as Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand, iMovie, Clips, and Swift Playgrounds have education-specific features that are used regularly by teachers and students.
With this in mind, Apple will discontinue iTunes U at the end of 2021. iTunes U will continue to be available to all existing customers through the 2020-2021 educational year. — Apple
According to Apple, iTunes U will be available for the 2020 to 2021 educational year, with support ending in late 2021. For public content publishers, until iTunes U is discontinued, new and existing content will be available publicly, but Apple suggests creators start exploring other options. Current iTunes U users can continue publishing content through Apple Podcasts or Apple Books.
MacDailyNews Take: The clean up of older outmoded products continues unabated.
Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. – Steve Jobs
Guess there are opinions and perspectives their millennials just can’t stand, huh? Free education: this makes the kind of sense that isn’t. Tim can take his recent virtue signaling and shove it up his pooper.
Probably a bit crowded in there.
Guys. Step back and let your homophobia take a rest. Apple will announce the retiring of a whole lot of sidelined products in the next month, as per Ars Technica (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/apple-plans-to-announce-arm-transition-for-all-macs-at-wwdc-2020/) they are going to announce in the WWDC 2020 keynote (a week from Monday) that all new Macs will be on ARM. Like the PowerPC, Intel, and 64-bit Intel transitions in the past, this is just the sort of hardware inflection point wherein Apple gracefully obsolesces strategically unaligned products and services, and focuses on the future. This willingness to “murder its darlings” is what has made Apple the first company on the planet to achieve a $1.5 trillion market cap.
Just enjoy it. Cash in your dividends. Don’t worry about whom Apple’s CEO loves. It’s not about your prejudices.
You assume they own any shares, or even care about tech, half don’t ever talk about Apple tech or finance just crap. If Apple switches the Mac to in house CPU’s that means buy shares now….
“Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. – Steve Jobs”
Not in your case Steve, because after you the “new” is Tim Cook, and new sure as hell isn’t always better.
Uh… I don’t know who you’re confusing with Apple Inc but Steve Jobs did the genius innovative founder’s work by creative a fantastic company with an unprecedented platform for new products and services. Then upon Steve’s death on October 5, 2011, Tim Cook followed to increase the value of the company by a mind-boggling 43% per year. That’s FREAKING NUTS. Every single predictive financial model for Apple, including the Ivy League financial strategy professors in my MBA program, was adamant that Apple’s growth would “revert to the norm” within a couple years.
Or is this just a homophobia thing?
You and Tim Cook only care about the money, while others care about the Apple legacy.
Just like with Pages, Apple’s marketing exceeds it’s ability to deliver. Someone tell me how the hell does a company spearhead digital education (Apple) only to lose to (Google) again. It always seems like Apple comes up with the great idea and Google follows through with an end to end solution. Apple Schoolwork and Classroom are not the same as ITunes U for some. ITunes U allows anyone to create coursework, not just those in a formal classroom setting…this is important if you belong to professional learning groups or co-op homeschooling programs. And having to use Googles creepy spy apps is NOT a solution.
Apple you pulled out of networking right when mesh networks were taking off, now your castrating yourself with digital education right when your golden opportunity for mass adoption of digital education is underway, WTF?
Apple, I hope in the end you create an elegant end-to-end education solution for both professional educators and other out of the box teachers.
iTunes U is (was) the largest repository of educational course material in the world, and it offers amazing opportunities for anyone to learn from the world’s leading teachers and institutions. More than 1,200 colleges and 1,200 K-12 schools and districts are hosting approximately 2,500 public courses and thousands of additional private courses.
Apple’s statement, “For public content publishers, until iTunes U is discontinued, new and existing content will be available publicly, but Apple suggests creators start exploring other options.”
Like what?
This was a great, FREE educational source for users around the world. Apple is basically abandoning it. Usage is already dropping and many users like myself are having trouble searching for classes that used to be very easy to find.
What a colossal fuck up Apple.
And they recommended moving iTunes U content to podcasts but they gutted the podcast app on MacOS in Catalina.
Clearly, Apple is run by a bunch of out-of-touch idiots…