The New iTunes U as LMS

Have you seen the the new iTunes U? It is now an app. Apple released three things at their education-focused event a few days ago: A new version of iBooks with support for interactive electronic textbooks, a tool to author interactive electronic textbooks, and a new version of iTunes U. While the announcements about the books and book authoring are getting tons of attention, I think the new version of iTunes U is just as important, maybe more so.

Here is what a course now looks like in iTunes U (which is now an app for iOS):

A course consists of the following areas:

• Info: In essence, this is the syllabus. It contains sections like “overview”, “about instructor”, “outline”. It looks like you may be able to add as many sections to this as you want. I have seen things like “requirements”, “required apps”, “assignments”.

• Posts: This is the course content – video, audio, weblinks, links to apps, chapters of interactive electronic extbooks, assignments with due dates. When an instructor makes a new “post”, students can opt in to get a push notification.

• Notes: free form notes and notes and annotations taken in ebooks all aggregated in one place.

• Materials: .I think this is the same resources from the “posts” section, but in a flat list, sorted by type, so you can be sure to download all the videos, apps, books, etc so you have them available when you need them.

This is really a barebones LMS. I don’t know what to make of that. Yes, It doesn’t have all the features of full-fledged LMS. There is no grade book, quizzes, discussion fora. But this is Apple’s first take. They are well known for releasing a minimalistic product that hits the most important features, then building upon that in further iterations. A 2009 survey of faculty and teaching assistants at Penn State found that “the items that were extremely important to the majority of individuals were: course mail (74.9%), syllabus (57.3%), drop boxes (56.2%) and grade books (54.7%).” iTunes U hits the first two features. I won’t be surprised if the next iteration of iTunes U has a way for students to turn in assignments. In fact the old iTunes U had a way to create a dropbox for students to add media to a course podcast. Don’t know if there is any way to do that in this new iTunes U.

Think of the first iPhone. It had no apps, multitasking, copy-and-paste. Not only was there no app store, but no one was even thinking that the iPhone needed an app store. Apps, yes, but the app store was not a popularized concept. Now the app store defines the iPhone and iPad experiences. Imagine where iTunes U could go in the coming years.

And even if Apple doesn’t move into feature X – iTunes U is all about aggregating stuff from the web, apps, and books. Social features perhaps could be provided by a third party app or web site. I wonder about this doubly so since apple has such a poor track record with social features.

I am very curious to see how iTunes U evolves in the coming several years. Think what will you will of Apple or proprietary solutions, but when a company this big and with such a track record of transforming industries starts pushing into the education space, you can’t ignore it.