• Table of Contents
• Previous Next

Preparing Content

This section describes how you can prepare and create course content, including how to structure Course pages within your institution’s iTunes U site.

iTunes U is designed to provide students and instructors easy access to course content. It can also provide access to institutional information such as on-campus events, news, sports, or a message from your institution’s president.

The following is an illustration of an iTunes U Course page.

Usually, instructors or course managers create or prepare content for the course, structure and organize the course and Course page, and then upload the content to the Course page.

You can create and prepare content for a course by recording lectures, developing assignments, creating videos and podcasts, and much more.

How a course is structured and organized depends on the instructor’s or course manager’s preferences. Each Course page can consist of various groups, displayed as tabs, used to help organize the course. Courses can, for example, be organized by media type. For example, a course covering iPhone application programming could have groups organized by audio content, video content, and PDF content.

Instructors and course managers can structure and organize a course however they deem appropriate. Course page groups provide a way to help subdivide and categorize courses.

Other groups might include a Drop Box for students to upload assignments for review by the instructor and a Shared group for students to upload assignments and share their work with others in the course. For example, in a journalism course, students might upload recorded interviews into a Drop Box group for the instructor to review.

The uploaded content can include information fields, such as Name or Artist, to help students locate and organize their iTunes U content after they download it to their computers, iPod music players, iPhone, and Apple TV. Before content is uploaded, use iTunes to add or edit track information to provide helpful details and extra information for students and others. For more information, see “Defining Track Preferences.”

Keep in mind that your courses should be organized in clear categories that are relevant to your institution, and you should develop a plan to manage your content on an ongoing basis. Keeping your content fresh and current will help maintain the effectiveness of your iTunes U site.

After creating course content and developing a structure for the course, you can upload the content into the different groups in the Course page. Depending on how the course is structured, you can upload content to a feed Course page or to simple, smart, or feed groups in the Course page. For information on these group types, see “Creating Group Types.” For information on how to upload content to iTunes U, see “Adding Content.”

In addition to groups, you can add links in the Course page to point students to more information. For example, you could add links to things such as department events, lecture series by visiting professors, pointers to reference information that pertain to the course, or the institution website. You use the Links box to create and edit links. For information on how to add links to other information in a Course page, see “Editing Course Pages.”

If your institution’s iTunes U site will be offered to the public, plan to include content categories relevant to the public. For example, Public Lecture Series, Museums on Campus, Special Collections, Digital Archives, Campus Life, or Published Research Results.

Whenever you create or update an iTunes U site for your institution, regardless of whether the site is available to the public, Apple provides guidelines designed to help you create an effective and clear iTunes U site. For more information, see Creating Your iTunes U Site (PDF) located at http://images.apple.com/support/itunes_u/docs/iTunes_Create_U_Guide.pdf.