iTunes U

» see itunes.apple.com/itunes-u as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

itunes u launched on may 30, 2007 as a free section of the itunes store with university lectures from stanford, mit, berkeley, and a growing list of partners. the format was the format of itunes. you subscribed to a course the way you subscribed to a podcast, and the next lecture downloaded to your ipod when you synced. apple put a syllabus and an institution logo on it and the whole thing felt official, which is how a 2008 listener experienced a stanford computer science class on the bus.

in january 2012 apple released a standalone itunes u app for ios that added textbooks, quizzes, and instructor-led course management. by 2013 apple claimed over a billion downloads of itunes u material, which was inflated by an audio definition of "download" but still represented a real channel. it was the dominant pre-mooc layer for distributing free university content for about six years.

by 2017 the store section was quietly killed and the content was moved into apple podcasts. on june 10, 2020, apple announced the standalone app would shut down at the end of 2021. it did, on december 31, 2021. the courseware ecosystem had moved to coursera and edx and youtube for the public side, and to canvas and blackboard for the institutional side, neither of which had ever needed apple as a delivery layer.

~ the dossier ~

~ what was on it ~

the marquee items in the first wave were stanford's introduction to artificial intelligence by sebastian thrun and peter norvig, mit's walter lewin physics lectures, yale's open course materials, and the oxford podcast archive. the catalog was uneven. some courses were three audio files and a syllabus. others were full semester video sets with problem sets and instructor q&a. there was no quality bar enforced from above. universities uploaded what they had.

this was the thrun and norvig course that later spawned udacity. itunes u did not own that lineage, but it carried the recordings to a million ipods before any of the dedicated mooc companies existed. for a window in 2008 and 2009, free university material on a portable device just meant itunes u.

~ the postmortem ~

apple's stated reason was that the itunes u tools were being replaced by next-generation apps for teachers and students, naming classroom and schoolwork plus apple school manager. translated, this meant the consumer side was being killed and the school-account-managed side would continue under a different brand. the lectures went to apple podcasts. the textbooks went to apple books. nothing was deleted in the strict sense. but the dedicated room with the university logos on the wall was closed.

~ honest distance ~

i was a computer engineering student in turkey during itunes u's prime years and i did not use it at meaningful scale. the language barrier was part of it, but the bigger part was that english-language lecture downloads at university dial-up speeds in 2008 were a multi-hour commitment for a single class. by the time turkish broadband caught up, youtube had become the place free university material actually lived, and itunes u was the prettier shelf that fewer people opened. i remember the icon on the iphone home screen. i do not remember finishing a course on it.

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