On its iTunes U portal, Apple’s digital-music store has already built up an impressive empire of recorded college lectures and events, all available for downloading. Now iTunes U is casting its gaze outside the ivory tower.
The portal has unveiled a new section, “Beyond Campus,” which collects educational material from museums, radio stations, and other public institutions. iTunes users can still watch lectures from Berkeley and guest speeches from Duke, but they can now also view live music performances from the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Sound Live series and take video walkthroughs of Richard Serra’s sculptures the Museum of Modern Art.
“As we started down the track of iTunes U, one thing we discovered is that there are a lot of institutions and companies with publicly available content that was highly valuable,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes, in an interview today. “Lots of people are willing to share, but they just haven’t had a great mechanism for it.”
Mr. Cue said that iTunes U is still adding new colleges and universities to its roster of participants: Vanderbilt and Yale Universities and the Universities of Arizona and Pennsylvania have all recently signed on with the service. —Brock Read
