iTunes U Administration Guide: About iTunes U Course Pages

About iTunes U Course Pages

iTunes U is designed to provide students, instructors, and the public 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. Each course has its own Course page.

Your site’s root page can display a collection of descendant Welcome pages and Course pages. When a user clicks a course title or thumbnail image in a Welcome page or Public Feature page, the associated Course page appears. Course pages contain the audio, video, or PDF content files you, instructors, staff, or students make available for download. What you can do do with these pages depends on the type of Course page and your access permissions. For example, an instructor or course manager might have permission to edit and manage a course, but a student might only have permission to browse the course and download information.

Within Course pages, depending on your access permissions, you can use editing tools to create different groups, displayed as tabs within the Course page, to help organize and manage all the course content. iTunes U supports simple and feed Course pages:

Use a simple Course page when you are building a course comprised of discrete simple, smart, or feed groups. Within a simple Course page, if you are using advanced access controls, you can assign permissions to each group to control user access to the content. You can create the following types of groups:
- Simple. A simple group populates track content in the Course page when users explicitly upload tracks to the course in your iTunes U site.
- Smart. A smart group displays tracks in the Course page by performing a search of your site for all tracks that match the criteria you specify.
- Feed. A feed group automatically populates track content in the Course page based on the specified podcast feed URL and details. Course content can be updated on a periodic basis and, depending on your settings, can be updated as often as every day.
Use a feed Course page when you want to automatically populate page content based on a specified Atom feed URL and details. Atom feeds can contain multiple versions or formats of your podcast for different uses or devices. Within a feed Course page, groups are automatically populated based on the specified Atom feed URL and details. Course content can be updated on a periodic basis and, depending on your settings, can be updated as often as every day.

The instructor or course manager creates or prepares content for the course, structures and organizes the course and Course page, and then adds the content to the Course page.

Remember that your content is what’s most important. Make sure you bring the best content to your site. And, if needed, start small. It’s better to start with a few great pieces of content. It’s best to try and build your site from the bottom up. Starting with Course pages, figuring out how much content you have, and then branching out to more groups, sections, and so on.

Site administrators control whether or not podcasting is a feature available within Course pages at your institution. Because distributing content via podcasting might be a security concern at your institution, it might not be available. If podcasting is available, users see a Subscribe button in the Course page. Clicking Subscribe allows users to subscribe to the selected podcast and use the podcasting features in iTunes.

If you are using advanced access controls, in addition to creating the groups for course content, you might create a group for students to upload their assignments and other work for review (for example, a group with permissions set to Drop Box). Only the site administrator, instructor, or course manager (or another user with editing access) can view all of the contents of this group. You might also create a group for students to share their work with others (for example, a group with permissions set to Shared). You as well as students, instructors, and course managers can view and download the contents from a shared group.

Example of an iTunes U Course page tab controls section in edit mode, with five groups.

To create groups with specific user access, first create the group, and then assign access permissions to the group. For details, see “Assigning User Access to Groups.”

When you add content, you add it to a specific group. Apple recommends that you think about how you want to organize content in the course before adding any content. This includes determining the number, names, and types of groups that you want to use to organize the course content. For more information, see “Preparing Content,” “Adding Content,” and “Creating Group Types.”