iTunes U for lifelong learners
Written by Brent Sheets
May 21
Are you a lifelong learner? Apple iTunes U was introduced two years ago this month and has amassed an incredible amount of learning content from top colleges and universities. While some content is restricted to students – much is freely available. Why not download some free educational material to your iPhone or iPod? Here’s how.
iTunes U, part of the iTunes Store, is possibly the world’s greatest collection of free educational media available to students, teachers, and lifelong learners. With over 100,000 educational audio and video files available, iTunes U has quickly become the engine for the mobile learning movement. It puts the power of the iTunes Store in the hands of qualifying universities so they can distribute their educational media to their students or to the world.
Since my love of astronomy is partially sated by the free educational material in iTunes U – I’ll use this topic as my example. Click this button 
to open iTunes U or start iTunes and select .
You’ll see 13 categories (listed further below). Clicking a main category reveals a pop-up menu for displaying subcategories. For example, click Science, then More and choose Astronomy. Be sure to explore your personal interests.
Apple likes to call this but you can view or listen to the academic content right in iTunes on your Mac. Although, it is very nice to be able to download educational media to an iPhone or iPod for learning on the go.
itunes university
There are 13 main categories in iTunes U, which contained 63 subcategories at the time of this writing. Drill down and explore a wealth of academic and educational material.
- Business (*4)
- Engineering (*5)
- Fine Arts (*8)
- Health & Medicine (*7)
- History (*6)
- Humanities (*3)
- Language (*4)
- Literature (*2)
- Mathematics (n/a)
- Science (*7)
- Social Science (*6)
- Society (*5)
- Teaching & Education (*6)
* subcategories inside
