The iTunes U team

Creative commons imageCredit: BY-NC-ND| Matthew Robertson

The Open University launched its first piece of educational content on iTunes U, a dedicated area within the iTunes Store, in June 2008. In 2007 North American universities used Apple’s iTunes as a powerful platform to reach their students and the wider world. On June 3 2008, Apple invited some other countries to join. The 3 European universities to launch at that time were The Open University, University College London (in the UK) and Trinity, Dublin (Ireland).  At launch, the OU had around 300 audio or video tracks from about 30 of its courses. By July 2010 there were 314 albums containing 2,727 tracks. The OU reached a milestone in 2010, as the first university to hit 20 million downloaded tracks and now has an average of 375,000 downloads a week.