Apple again made headlines this week with its effort to revolutionize the educational market through the iPad, with an updated version of iBooks and a new app for iTunes U. Combined with the Mac-based iBooks Author, the company is poised to help put iPads in thousands more schools across the United States and indeed, even more worldwide.
The first prong in Apple’s new educational weapon is an update to iBooks, which now clocks in at 36.9MB and introduces textbooks to the mix. If that move alone isn’t revolutionary enough for you, how about the amazingly low price of only $14.99 each (compared to most print textbooks which run upward of $75)?
To access textbooks, open iBooks 2 on your iPad -- they’re not available from the iPhone or iPod touch -- tap Categories and select the Textbooks section. (Alternately, you can shop directly from iTunes.) At launch, there are only a few select titles available from publishers McGraw-Hill and Pearson which include Algebra, Chemistry, Geometry and Physics -- in fact, there are exactly eight textbooks currently available, which is something of a disappointment. (Hey, no revolution happens overnight… right?) Textbooks from the third major publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, are promised as “coming soon.”
Seven of the eight titles currently available are priced at $14.99, which Apple has mandated as the top-tier price for textbooks (some titles may eventually be lower). Apple did manage to nab one exclusive for its iBooks 2 launch, E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth -- or at least 51 pages of it, since the textbook isn’t actually completed yet. The good news is that the title is currently free for what’s available now, and additional chapters will arrive for a fee as they are completed.
You may need to free up space on your iPad, particularly if you own a 16GB model -- most of these textbooks weigh in at 1GB or more (Life on Earth is a modest 965MB by comparison, but keep in mind it’s only part of the book!). Purchasing happens the same way other App Store/iBookstore purchases do: Tap the price, tap again to confirm the purchase, enter your password and sit back and wait as it downloads -- which may take even longer if you have iTunes in the Cloud switch on for iBooks, since it will also start downloading the same title to iTunes as well.
Most textbooks begin with a short video introduction followed by a table of contents, which allows the student to quickly jump directly to the section they need. In landscape mode, individual pages can also be accessed via a scrolling ribbon at the bottom with a swipe left or right. In portrait mode, the focus is more on text and less on graphics, with pages flowing with a vertical swipe, rather than having to manually turn the page.
Tap a photo to enlarge it, then pinch to zoom or rotate -- many even include the ability to zoom into a specific section to learn more about individual elements of that image. Likewise, videos appear as static images with the familiar play button embedded in the center -- tap and the video zooms to full screen and begins playback.
One of the major benefits of a digital textbook is the ability to make highlights or notes inside it, rather than resorting to the traditional pencil and paper. iBooks 2 makes it easy, with a special “My Notes” section. For highlights, simply tap and hold on a word, then drag your finger to highlight text, which can include the entire passage, if you’d like. To add a note to a selected highlight, tap it and select the notes icon, then enter your text.
If you haven’t already downloaded the first two chapters of E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth free of charge, it’s worth doing so to marvel at exactly how interactive these textbooks can be -- and to catch a glimpse of how they’ll change the future of education once students manage to actually get their hands on them.
The second part of Apple’s educational assault is a new app for the four-year-old iTunes U catalog. The 12.1MB universal app is also free and offers courses created and taught by instructors from leading universities and other schools. Apple claims it’s “the world’s largest catalog of free education content,” with more than 500,000 free lectures, videos, books and other resources on thousands of subjects ranging from Algebra to Zoology -- and most anything in-between.
Culled from institutions in 26 countries -- including Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, UC Berkeley, MoMA, The New York Public Library and The Library of Congress, the new iTunes U app takes education mobile in a whole new way.
If you’re new to iTunes U, your faux mahogany bookshelves will be empty at first, save for a reminder to tap the Catalog button to browse for content. The app will also ask if you want to sync with your iTunes Store account so notes and course information can be synced between devices, so be sure to accept the prompt when it pops up.
Inside the Catalog, users are presented with available courses, which can be viewed based on Universities & Colleges, Beyond Campus or K-12 categories. We decided to subscribe to Stanford’s iPad and iPhone App Development (Fall 2011) course, which makes available 50 lecture slides, videos and other content from the Materials tab. The course will then appear from the Library, much in the same way iBooks works.
Students can then play video or audio lectures, read books and view presentations right from the iTunes U app, checking off assignments on your list as they’re completed. Finally, iTunes U works in tandem with iBooks, iCloud and other apps, making it easy for students to keep up with their courses -- textbooks can be purchased right from iBooks with a tap in the iTunes U app, and notes taken in iBooks 2 can also be reviewed within iTunes U.
With more than 1.5 million iPads already in use at educational institutions, iBooks 2 and iTunes U are poised to help Apple sell even more, and continue to dominate the tablet market for years to come.
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