Nearly one year ago Apple announced the development of iTunes U, a space within the Apple infrastructure dedicated to the support of higher education podcast development. By working in collaboration with a number of colleges and universities, Apple has developed a unique environment that removes many of the barriers previously hindering educators from entering the realm of podcasting. iTunes U provides disk space, bandwidth, and a simplified mechanism for publishing a podcast ‘feed’ in a familiar environment to both educators and students alike, iTunes.

Since the initial announcement, hundreds of schools have signed on to begin taking advantage of this unique new media opportunity. Arizona State University was an early adopter. We initially began to transition from our previous podcasting infrastructure and mechanisms last summer, and started to more fully focus our efforts throughout the Fall 2006 semester. It has been an exciting time of growth and development as we have moved throughout this year from only a handful of ASU podcasts to now several hundred of departments, schools, and individual faculty and researchers signing onto our ASU on iTunes U environment. However, despite the initial buzz among educational podcasters, iTunes U has remained a fairly obscure entity throughout the rest of the mediated world. Though now, that has changed. Today, Apple announced the transition of iTunes U from the isolated corners of its own research and development network into the public iTunes Music Store.

”CUPERTINO, California—May 30, 2007—Apple® today announced the launch of iTunes® U, a dedicated area within the iTunes Store (www.itunes.com) featuring free content such as course lectures, language lessons, lab demonstrations, sports highlights and campus tours provided by top US colleges and universities including Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Duke University and MIT.”
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/05/30itunesu.html

This is excellent news. Prior to this move, content served by individual iTunes U institutions has been somewhat clouded by obscurity. iTunes U provides mechanisms for both ‘Private’ content that is typically dedicated and available only to a select registered audience (students enrolled in a particular class for example), as well as ‘Public’ content which is available and consumable by the world at large. However, such public content has likely not seen as wide an audience as many would have liked. One had to know of the existence of iTunes U public content, and for that matter any individual institution’s entire iTunes U site, in order to locate and download public programming. While websites and blogs associated with individual podcasts can certainly help promote the awareness of public content on iTunes U or any other podcasting service, this move by Apple to position iTunes U material directly into the same space as the rest of the iTunes Music Store content, will certainly help to increase awareness and impact of all of our iTunes U programs and material. This is an excellent opportunity, and my hope is that we all will take full advantage by producing good, useful, compelling, and important programming to offer into this exciting new realm.