Open University's marketing message on iTunes U.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jim Dalrymple/CNET)The education-specific channel of its iTunes Store, launched in 2007, has reached a new milestone, recording more than 100 million downloads, Apple told CNET on Friday.
According to Apple, one of the most popular areas of iTunes U has been that of the United Kingdom-based Open University (iTunes link), whose learning categories include Arts and Humanities, Business and Management, Childhood and Youth, Health and Social Care, Law, Psychology, and Science. The academic institution says it caters to at least 150,000 undergraduate and 30,000 postgraduate students, more than 25,000 of whom live outside the U.K.
More than 175 higher-education organizations currently provide content to iTunes U, including Princeton University, University of California at Los Angeles, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oxford University, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and Yale University.
Stanford University on Monday said its free iPhone Application Programming course has been downloaded more than 1 million times since being uploaded to Apple's iTunes U--a learning-focused area of iTunes--seven weeks ago.
The course is a series of classroom videos taken from the live lectures at Stanford. Apple engineers teach the course to students in an auditorium at Stanford's Quad--the videos are uploaded to iTunes U two days after every class, giving the public free access to the material. The university even makes copies of the slides shown during the class available to the public.
Jason Ediger, Apple's director of iTunes U and Mobile Learning, said this is the fastest any course hit the million download mark on iTunes U. Certainly a testament to the amount of interest from would-be iPhone developers.
Apple currently has over 40,000 apps available for download from the App Store, according to numbers from 148 Apps, an enthusiast Web site that monitors the number of apps on the store.
iPhone Application Programming is a 10-week course and can be downloaded free from iTunes U. Only students enrolled in the classroom course will receive credit, according to the university.
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