What a great opportunity to brush up on controversies in Astrophysics, Game Theory, or France since 1871. Apple and Yale University have partnered to bring complete Yale courses to iTunes U and they are free for the clicking.

Apple was already offering significant quantities of lectures and interviews from Yale, but now complete courses are being offered for free. For now, there are 13 complete courses online, one subject area is composed of about 40-50 separate podcasts. That's a lot of information and precious knowledge.

If learning about the American Novel since 1945, or Biomedical Engineering is your thing, click right on over. There is probably something on the list you'll find interesting, to say nothing of the many great lectures.

The twists and turns of the digital revolution have been breathtaking to watch. From my home, an office, sitting at an airport, or riding along in a car, bus, plane or train I can take my favorite music, movies, or listen to experts relate the latest discoveries about Black Holes of the history of Psychology. What a world.

If you're an aspiring iPhone developer looking to hone your skills or a seasoned veteran who is willing to accept there is more to learn, then has Stanford University got a deal for you. Stanford and Apple have teamed up to offer course materials from Stanford's undergraduate program for iPhone developers.

The materials, available through Stanford's iTunes U page, include videos and PDFs to be made available every Wednesday and Friday during the 10-week course. Please bear in mind that while Stanford's course will be taught by Apple engineers, it is no substitute for the many great courses offered by Professor Bohon at TUAW-U.

Update: As a couple of you have pointed out, Stanford is not actually an Ivy League school. For a complete list of Ivy League members please see this article.

[via Engadget]

The ongoing expansion of edu-world content in iTunes continues with Friday's addition of PBS to iTunes U (direct link); teaching support videos and instructional content from KQED, WETA, WNET thirteen, WGBH and more. Video clips that illustrate science, geography or history (including segments from Ken Burns' documentary The War) are accompanied by PDF lesson plans and educator's guides -- awful handy!

While all the iTunes U PBS content is free to download and use, the PBS shows already on iTunes remain for-pay. Too bad -- I suppose I'll have to pay $4.99 a show if I'm going to grab some NOVA episodes and settle in.

[via Apple Hot News]

iTunes U, Apple's program to host multimedia files and podcasts for various institutes of learning in the iTunes Store, has a brand new member -- a big one. The New York Public Library has just launched its iTunes U page. Included are lots of audio programs broken up into several sections, as well as some archival material. The best part, of course, is that all of this content is free.

[via NYPL Labs]

Along with iTunes Plus and DRMless tracks Apple also announced that iTunes U will now be available via the iTunes Store for everyone. iTunes U started a year and a half ago as a pilot program at Stanford which put some lectures online with iTunes. Apple and Stanford then created a custom iTunes interface for use at Stanford and the rest is history.

Now the general public will have access to materials from top rated universities, and best of all it is free. As with the other iTunes announcements today, this isn't available in the iTunes Store just yet, but I have a feeling we'll see it soon.

Update: iTunes U lives [iTunes link].

Queens University of Kingston, Ontario is the first non-United-Statesian university to begin offering downloadable content via the iTunes music store. Yesterday, Queens joined Stanford, Duke, and Berkeley as part of iTunes U, Apple's free hosted service for colleges and universities. The Queens University site offers "public lectures, debates, sports highlights and more"--or at least it plans to. Current highlights include convocation lectures (which I am sure are just as fascinating as the material suggests--isn't it interesting that some of the first content caters to administration vanity?), lectures from EECS assistant professor Tom Dean, and material from CFRC, the student-run radio station.

Thanks, Ben.

We haven't talked about iTunes U here in a while, but it's been on my mind lately, as I'm heading up my U's roll-out. It's a long, tortuous process--because of our internal bureaucracy, not Apple's--but, despite the fact I haven't been talking to our official reps (the extent of those conversations has been "we're still working out the details"), I have had the opportunity to sit down with some people from Apple and talk about the project. One of the topics of discussion was the direction of iTunes U 2.0 development. Apparently Apple has significantly increased the personnel dedicated to the project and has a number of enhancements planned. The person I was talking to couldn't tell me what, exactly, but he said that they were looking at community feature requests. Naturally, my next question was "well, what features have people requested?" The answers surprised me. Among the most requested features is on-site storage. This was a little bit of a shock, since one of the selling points for me was letting Apple handle the potentially multi-terabyte storage requirements and not worring about managing--not to mention funding--a SAN of that size myself. I can understand, though, that people want to keep control of their own information, and have on-site backups, etc. Closely following that was e-commerce capability. Again, a bit of a surprise. I wouldn't expect a free service to allow me to charge for access. on the other hand, I suspect that some professors would like to include materials that require royalty payment, so some vehicle for processing that will be required eventually, I suppose.

The #1 request, though, completely floored me: DRM. In fact, it is so in-demand that it has apparently been the deal-breaker for the majority of universities that had been approached about iTunes U and refused. That revelation literally left me speechless. It's one thing to realize that not everyone is as rabidly anti-DRM as I am, but DRM in the classroom flies in the face of not only my general IP position, but everything I like to believe about academic freedom. I've heard of cases, of course, where universities have claimed faculty-developed course materials as work-for-hire and property of the university, but that's never been the case at any university I've been associated with and I've generally understood that those were fringe cases. The idea that a significant number of universities would refuse to participate in iTunes U because of a lack of DRM is just...staggering.

Of course, that doesn't mean that FairPlay or any other DRM will find its way into iTunes U. But if Apple is dedicated to the project and the one of the biggest stumbling blocks seems to be DRM, well, you do the math.

And the worst part? If FairPlay does show up it won't be Apple's fault, or even the RIAA's. The universities will have done it to themselves.

Update: just wanted to clarify that second sentence a little. It's come to my attention that the original wording led a couple of people to jump to incorrect conclusions. You guys remember the bit about "assume," right?

Apple unleashed iTunes U to an unsuspecting world a few months ago with some success. You can now add UC Berkeley to the list of institutions that are using iTunes to deliver course podcasts to their students (and anyone else that visits itunes.berkeley.edu).

Thanks, Ben.

Last Fall, Stanford University began a partnership with Apple to publish and host lectures for download via the iTunes Store. Called Stanford on iTunes, it's been a resounding success and now Apple is looking to replicate that success with other schools around the country and world.

iTunes U. (for University) will be a partnership between Apple and schools for hosting and distributing audio and video lectures, podcasts, and vidcasts to their student bodies. Modeled after the Stanford on iTunes program, iTunes U. will be a free service and allow a school to create an environment for instructors to upload their audio and video podcasts for distribution to their student bodies.

It will likely incorporate some of what Apple has been calling Quicktime 2 RSS, a set of tools for recording a lecture and then encoding it for playback on a computer or an iPod.

iTunes U. is looking like a powerful way to expand how students get content. We're living in an increasingly digital world, we may as well embrace learning digitally, and it's good to see Apple take the lead in providing the tools, the hosting, and the technology to allow such a shift to happen. I'm definitely going to be lobbying for my employer (a university) to get involved in this program.

I've been complaining that Apple hasn't been as competitive as they should be in the Education market for some time. Perhaps this is a sign that the times are a-changing. Truly interesting.

If any TUAW readers have used the Stanford pilot program, we'd definitely be interested in your impression of the system.