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A+ for Apple's educational content, shame about the irrelevant pic below
Fri, 1st Mar 2013
FYI, this story is more than a year old

One billion dollars means a heck of lot to Dr Evil.

But frankly, one billion iTunes U content downloads means even more to Apple.

The Cupertino company announced the feat in a fit of child-like glee, clearly delighted it's online catalog of free educational content from top schools and prominent libraries, museums and organisations continues to dominate the online space.

Designed chiefly to help educators create courses including lectures, assignments, books, quizzes and more for iOS users around the world, Apple aims to revolutionise teaching methods across the globe.

“It’s inspiring to see what educators and students of all types are doing with iTunes U,” says Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services.

“There are now iTunes U courses with more than 250,000 students enrolled in them, which is a phenomenal shift in the way we teach and learn.”

Over 1,200 universities and colleges host more than 2,500 public and thousands of private courses encompassing the arts, health and medicine, education and business etc.

But what about technology? Surely Apple would be big on that, you'd think wouldn't you?

But expectedly it is big on expanding the brand, with leading universities including Duke, Yale, Cambridge, MIT and Oxford enrolling over 100,000 students in single iTunes U courses, while Stanford University and The Open University have each surpassed 60 million content downloads. Not to be sniffed at for sure.

Without becoming all serious and meaningful on you, education is an important aspect of society which is often ignored.

Which is why it can be only good news that educators can now create iTunes U courses in 30 countries including recent additions: Brazil, South Korea, Turkey and United Arab Emirates.

Which according to my high school geography class - they are all suburbs in Eastern Russia. Yeah, pretty sure that's right.

Catch a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man through iTunes U, teach him for life. And that's TechDay's biblically baffling but brilliant closure to this article.

Class dismissed.