Apple doesn’t really talk much about iTunes U, its educational content service powered by iTunes on iOS devices. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a success.

Apple announced today that iTunes U has reached 1 billion content downloads, a sign that schools around the world are embracing Apple’s edtech model. Educators can use iTunes U to collect course materials and make them easily available to students.

Apple released a new version of the iTunes U iOS app in early 2012, along with its new iBooks digital textbook initiative. The company’s approach to edtech still isn’t foolproof — it depends on students having expensive iPads, which makes it impractical for schools and students without money to burn. Still, for those with access to Apple’s ecosystem, it’s an easy way to easily offer course materials to students. (It’s definitely simpler than photocopying large packets of material, forcing students to buy plenty of expensive books, and making students keep track of a wide variety of physical course material.)

Apple says 60 percent of iTunes U app downloads (which I’m reading as just the app), originate from outside the U.S. — it’ll be interesting to see if that gap continues to grow for international educators.

Back in August 2010, when iTunes U was still something accessed through iTunes on Macs and PCs, Apple announced it reached 300 million content downloads. It looks like the move towards iOS devices has made iTunes U even more popular with educators.

Apple is competing with traditional education content services like BlackBoard, as well as digital textbook companies like Inkling, but it remains the only company that offers both a home for course materials and a way to build digital textbooks.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

When Apple announced its textbook initiative on Thursday, there was a rush of excitement among educators. Textbooks from major publishers, which can cost $40 to $75 dollars in print, would be available as interactive e-books for $15 or less. The new iBooks Author application could turn anyone into a publisher, with its simple interactive e-book creation tools.

But then there was the small print: In order to buy and read these textbooks, each student will have to own an Apple iPad. No computer, off-brand tablet, or even iPhone or iPod touch will work. Books made with the new iBooks Author application are only viewable on iPads in the iBooks 2 app, can only be sold through Apple’s iBookstore (where the company takes its customary 30 percent of the sales cost), and cannot be exported as ePubs, the standard open format for all e-book files.

For the schools that can afford iPads, Apple’s new apps and partnerships are brimming with potential.

“We looked at each other after the announcement, and said ‘Apple must have been reading our minds. This is exactly what we’ve been talking about,’” said Eric Spross, director of technology at the private Menlo School in Atherton, Calif.

Menlo School’s iPad pilot program has been in place for more than a year. All eighth and tenth graders are given an iPad for the school year, and though the school owns the tablets, the kids have full custody and can take them home.

“We felt that laptops and desktops focus students too much on the technology and not enough on the content or communication with another human,” said Spross. “We choose iPads because they’re lightweight, portable, have a long battery life, and are self-service. They’re easier to support.”

Apple’s education announcement was the missing piece in a puzzle for Menlo School. Even though it already had the iPad program, its devices hadn’t made the leap to being e-readers due to a dearth of e-textbooks. Apple’s new partnerships with publishers Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson will fix that.

Teachers were streaming some iTunes U content, but not much since publishing was limited to university-level courses. Now iTunes U is open to high schools, and a new iTunes U iOS app makes the content accessible from anywhere. Interestingly, Spross said teachers were also eager for a way to create and share their own lessons and books, which they can do on iBooks Author (as soon as they upgrade to Lion).

Tuition for Menlo School is $34,900 year. The school purchased all the iPads at full price from its own technology budget.

Not every school is so fortunate.

“We don’t really have a technology budget,” said Maria De La Vega, superintendent of the Ravenswood public school district in East Palo Alto, Calif. (not far from Menlo School, and a mre 30 minute drive from Apple HQ). “Most of what we’ve been able to acquire has been through donations and leftovers from offices closing down.” HP donated a number of small laptops to the district, so there’s now one computer for every sixth to eighth grade student. But those devices will be unable to read the new digital textbooks or any content created with iBooks Author.

The iPad is currently the most expensive consumer tablet on the market, starting at $499. While Apple is bringing down the prices of iPad-only textbooks, the company does not offer any known discounts on its iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch hardware to educational institutions, even for bulk orders.

“I’ve heard of the Kindle and the Kindle Fire, and I understand that they’re not as expensive. But I don’t know if they’re compatible,” said De La Vega optimistically (they’re not). While she thinks e-textbooks are a great idea for saving money, she is realistic about the challenges of making the switch.

“We’d have a lot of questions about how they would work, like security and what grade level they’d be most successful with. We’d need to make sure our staff is well trained, to utilize and make the most out of the program,” De La Vega said.

The nearly 100,000 U.S. public schools face restraints beyond money. They are also bound by state and federal regulations that dictate what books they use and what they can spend money on. Unless the full, approved list of school textbooks are made available on the iPad, these schools wouldn’t be able to use textbooks based on the Apple tablets even if they could save money that way.

“Teachers in private schools can select their own textbooks. Public schools can’t. That’s a distinction that’s larger than having iPads or if they can afford the technology,” said Menlo School’s Spross. He pointed out that it’s not all bleak for public schools: “Some of the most compelling and innovative work has been in public schools, in very scientific, state-sponsored programs.”

The iPad restriction is odd for another reason: Tying a file to one piece of hardware (in this case, a textbook to an iPad) is a step backward for a company that knows the future lies with accessing your data from multiple devices. Toward that end, Apple was an early adopter of cloud storage for consumers. Steve Jobs unveiled the company’s iCloud service in June 2011, which enables you to store music, books, photos, contacts, calendars, and more in the cloud.

Cloud storage might make the difference for e-textbooks, too. Only when public schools can put $15 e-textbooks on donated laptops, inexpensive e-ink readers, smartphones, and whatever devices students may already own, can Apple’s textbook “reinvention” be taken seriously by public schools.

Additionally, Apple should update its iBook Author application export to the more universal ePub 3 format and rewrite the iBooks Author end user license agreement so that books made with the application can be sold anywhere. (Can you imagine if music made in Garage Band could only be sold in iTunes?)

Until then, there are other great projects successfully using technology to bring affordable and free education to kids who wouldn’t normally have access to it. The One Laptop Per Child organization unveiled its sub-$100 X0-3 tablet at CES this month. The Khan Academy has more than 2,700 free online video classes on everything from Michelangelo to microeconomics. In India, the government has created the $35 Aakash tablet which will be used to educate underprivileged kids. And Apple of course offers iTunes U, a huge collection of free lectures and courses from top universities.

At Menlo School, Spross is already busy figuring out how to best use the new Apple products, which were the missing piece in the school’s technology puzzle. “Without this last piece it was, ‘Wow, great gizmo with a lot of potential, but does it mean anything?’”

But for most public schools, the iPad will continue to be a missing piece.

Photo via Barrett.Discovery/Flickr

The company launched a new version of its iBooks (iBooks 2) iOS application for the iPhone and iPad, which will offer highly interactive electronic textbooks, as well as a new textbook section in the iBookstore. It also debuted an updated version of its education-based service iTunes U, which gives teachers the ability to do much more than create lectures for download.

While all of these additions are great, some people are skeptical that Apple’s new initiative can do much to improve the country’s education system.

Entering the textbook industry alone is definitely worth Apple’s time if the company’s only motivation is to make money. As VentureBeat previously reported, the education book publishing industry is mammoth, bringing in annual revenue upwards of $5.5 billion for sales of lower education (Kindergarten to 12th grade) and $3.7 billion for sales of scholarly/higher education in 2010, according to statistics from the Association of American Publishers.

It’s true that Apple is a business, and the principle reason for every business is to turn a profit. But as history has proven with the iPod (a.k.a. digital music revolution), Apple’s business strategies revolve around improving an entire industry to gain long-term, stable profit. This business strategy is also how Apple plans to approach education and textbooks.

There is also plenty of proof that suggests Apple wants to revolutionize education. Dearly departed former Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs discussed the topic in Walter Issacson’s official biography of Jobs, as VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi recently pointed out. But Apple also owes much of its early success to education, as Apple marketing senior vice president Phil Schiller said at the education event today. (And for what it’s worth, I did use Mac computers almost exclusively while attending public school in the ’90s.)

Ultimately, it’s impossible to know if the American education system will improve as a result of Apple making its platforms and devices more accessible to learning or teaching in the classroom. It’s reasonable to assume that making Apple platforms/devices more education-friendly will entice more school systems to use Apple products. And it’s highly likely that when teachers or students do used these more classroom-friendly Apple devices, it will improve the learning process.

But if there’s one thing that won’t improve the U.S. education system going forward, it’s spending an exuberant and unnecessary amount of money on paper textbooks year-after-year. If nothing else, school boards across the country may eventually divert the money they spend on textbooks to spending money on Apple technology as a more efficient use of resources.

Check out the fact-filled infographic below for more information regarding Apple’s ability to save the U.S. education system.

[Infographic via Online Education]

(Click image to enlarge)

Apple is sending out media invitations to an event next week where it plans to make an “education announcement”, much to the dismay of many fanboys and fangirls hoping for information about the company’s next generation iPad.

The event, which is scheduled for January 19 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, is expected to be a low-key affair. The invitation, as you’d expect, doesn’t contain any details that would shed light on what the announcement will be. It could be something as ambitious as putting iPads in the hands of more public school children, the next evolution of its iTunes U service or maybe even something that would disrupt the textbook industry. (It’s worth noting that the Guggenheim Museum is where Apple announced the News Corp.-owned iPad “newspaper” The Daily.)

Walter Isaacson, who authored the official biography of Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs, has commented that the company was working on a project involving school text books. Yet, Jobs declined to go into detail about the project since it was (is) Apple’s creation and not a personal project.

The education book publishing industry is mammoth, bringing in annual revenue upwards of $5.5 billion for sales of lower education (Kindergarten to 12th grade) and $3.7 billion for sales of scholarly/higher education in 2010, according to statistics from the Association of American Publishers. So it makes perfect sense that Apple would want to enter into an $8 billion industry. (It also helps that textbooks are very expensive, mostly because of unnecessary bureaucracy or a lack of regulation at the university level.)

What do you think Apple will announce? Let us know in the comments.

[Via The Loop]

The section now offers more than 350,000 audio and video files from over 800 universities across the world. Most recently, schools from Japan, China, Mexico, Hong Kong, and Singapore have added content to the collection.

Currently, well-known schools like MIT, Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford use iTunes U to make their course content freely available to the public. It’s an easy way for curious iTunes users to brush up on specific topics, and it also gives prospective students a glance at the sort of education these schools offer. For students of the schools, it’s also an easy way to get course material — including presentations shown in class, or even lectures in podcast form. Content from iTunes U can be viewed on Mac and PC computers, as well as on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

Many schools choose to adopt iTunes U because it allows them to offer content through an interface students already know, and it means they don’t have to rely on an internal content management system as much. Expect to see even more schools jumping on services like iTunes U over the next few years as they look for ways to engage with a more tech-savvy student population.