Apple enlarges educational content footprint in Asia

Apple has quietly built an entire content ecosystem around the education market with a combination of free and paid software and content. Last week, the company expanded its ecosystem into more markets across Asia with iBooks Textbooks and iTunes U Course Manager available in more countries. 

The company observes that electronic textbooks are dynamic and interactive, have the advantage of not weighing down a backpack, can be updated as events unfold, and do not need to be returned as with library books. 

iBooks Textbooks bring Multi-Touch textbooks with content to teachers and students in 51 countries now including Japan. The software offers iPad users fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, rotating 3D diagrams, flick-through photo galleries and tap-to-play videos.  

iBooks Textbooks now cover General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) core curriculum in the UK as well as the US high school core curriculum. The collection includes nearly 25,000 educational titles created by independent publishers, teachers and leading education services companies, plus educational content from Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Hodder Education.

The “Oxford University Press is using iBooks Author for Headway, Oxford’s all-time best-selling English language series, to create engaging iBooks Textbooks for iPad,” said Peter Marshall, Managing Director, ELT Division at Oxford University Press. “In releasing 13 new iBooks Textbooks, including ‘Headway Pre-Intermediate,’ the best-selling level in the series, we are enriching the language learning experience for students around the world.”

Apple has also made iTunes U Course Manager available in more Asian countries, including Thailand and Malaysia. The free iOS app allows educators to create and distribute courses for their own classrooms or share them publicly on the iTunes U app.

“The incredible content and tools available for iPad provide teachers with new ways to customise learning unlike ever before,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services. “We can’t wait to see how teachers in even more countries will create their new lesson plans with interactive textbooks, apps and rich digital content.”

With iTunes U Course Manager, educators can quickly and easily share their knowledge and resources directly with their class or to a global audience on iTunes U. According to Apple, learners have access to the world’s largest online catalogue of free educational content from top schools, universities and other institutions.

iTunes U Course Manager also gives teachers the ability to integrate their own documents as part of course curriculum, as well as content from the Internet, hundreds of thousands of books on the iBooks Store, over 750,000 materials from existing iTunes U collections, or any of the more than one million iOS apps available on the Apple App Store.