Apple recently released iTunes U, a hosted content management system that allows educational institutions to upload and delivery media files to their students through an interface that is nearly identical to the iTunes Music store. Apple has piloted this system at a number of schools including Stanford, Duke and the University of Michigan.
The service is customizable, allowing institutions to choose color themes and add logos and images to their pages within the system. In addition, the service can be set up to use an institution’s authentication and authorization services, includes online editing tools for courses and will automatically generate a podcast feed for any course.
A good course management system should be able to generate RSS 2.0 feeds itself and allow its users to subscribe to these in iTunes or any RSS reader. This way, links to audio and video files can be better contextualized in a richer feed that may include study questions, outlines, discussions and so on. The advantage to an institution of generating its own RSS feeds is also more control over its content.
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