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My purpose for this tutorial is to show you how to access iTunes U content from an iPad.
So first open your ipad. If you have the app installed already as I do then all you have
to do is click on the app. But I am going to assume that you don�t have it. Which
means you are going to have to click on the App Store to install it. If I do that, this
is what the App store front page looks like. You can do a Search in the search box for
the iTunes U app or you can find it easily in the Education category. Click on Education
category and you can easily find the iTunes U app. It�s a free app. However you find
it, first you need to click on it. Once you click on it a little window will show up.
Normally here you will see the Install Button. Since I already have this installed on my
other mobile devices you see the little iCloud icon. Regardless, you will need to click on
Install and you�ll get the status update as the application is installing. Once it
is finished you will have the word Open appear so you can open the application from there
or wherever it installed on your iPad. To access the content on iTunes U you will first
need to install it. So once it is installed you double click on it and you will get an
image that looks like this. It is a bookshelf and you can choose either to Browse or Subscribe
to free content in the iTunes U catalog. Once you subscribe to courses they are going to
fill up here on your bookshelf. There will be an image that corresponds to each course
so what you�ll see on the bookshelf will be the images associated with each course.
So to subscribe to a course you will first need to click on the catalog. There are a
variety of ways to access the courses you want to subscribe to. The course I want happens
to be the most popular course on iTunes. So if your course happens to be here then you
just click on it. You click on any class you want to subscribe to, it�ll always be free.
So if I were to click on my Philosophy of Mind course, this window pops up. And in order
to get a class all you have to do is click subscribe. Once you click here you click Get
the Course. Once you click that it says Are you sure? Yes I�m sure. It will download
onto the bookshelf in your library, which is how you will access your content. But I
want to add a couple different courses a couple different ways. That is your UNO courses,
into your iTunes U. From the catalog, choose Colleges and Universities and scroll down
that long list until you reach the University of New Orleans. Once you click on UNO, a page
like this will show up. Which is a listing of all the iTunes U courses that UNO is hosting
or sponsoring. If you see the course you want that is great- just click on it. Let�s assume
you don�t see course you want another way to see all of the courses UNO offers at the
time is to click see all. At the moment UNO doesn�t have a lot of classes. But whatever
the class is if its being offered through UNO then it will be here and publicly available.
So you select the class you want. In this case let�s select Intro to Philosophy class.
And just like before in order to access the content you can stream it by playing it without
actually downloading it, you can download each one individually, but the easiest way
to access the course is to just Subscribe to the class. Click Subscribe, as before-
�Are you sure you want to get it?� �Get.� The window will disappear and it will go to
the Library and the image that is associated with the class will appear. Let�s add another
class. Let�s say instead of going to the Feautred classes or the Colleges and Universities
you go to a top class somewhere- maybe not a UNO class but there are a variety of categories.
So in this case I will switch from the Featured view to the Top Charts View and since Philosophy
is one of the subjects for the Top classes I�ll select Philosophy and what�ll pop
up will be the top 10 courses for Philosophy. In this case, UNO classes are doing quite
well. At the time I took this screenshot my Ethics course was number 8 so let�s select
the Ethics class to enroll in it. To show you another way to access classes. As always
just click on Subscribe and then get course, get course. Since we have done this for three
classes now, this is what your bookcase looks like. You have a visual representation of
each course. The number that you see associated with each of these courses is the number of
posts in each class. I�ll show you how this works in just a second. But basically iTunes
U is the free educational arm of the iTunes store. It doesn�t cost you anything to access
these classes but the advantage to having the iTunes U app on either your iPad or your
iPhone or your iPod for that matter is that the instructors can organize your course material
in such a way that you just go through the posts in order so you�ll see an assignment.
You�ll have the lecture- you can listen to the lecture. You�ll have the slides you
can do the slides. Maybe you can link to some web stuff. So let�s see how this works.
If I click on my Philosophy of Mind class this is the default page that opens up. This
is essentially just a Course description, you can see the tabs to the right. I�ve
got the Info for the class, the posts which I was just talking about. Notes, which is
a way for you to take notes as you are completing through course material, and all of the materials
the instructor makes available to you. That is all of the lectures, all of the lecture
notes, the links to online stuff and so on. So I typically find it easier to work on an
iPad in this view but if you turn it to the side, and in fact I�ll have to reduce this
image a bit. It�s a little small so I don�t expect you to read it but again you get this
same little notebook view for the course. But here you�ve got the overview in the
info section which is the same. If you click on Instructor it�ll give you the Instructor�s-
in fact if the intstructor has set it up to where you can email him or her all you�ll
have to do is select Send Email to the instructor. And the final thing will be the outline- which
I�ll access here. And the outline will be how the instructor has organized the class
material so it�ll be a typical outline. But you�ll find the posts organized according
to the outline. I find it easier to access course material according to this view as
opposed to the other view. Now the outline is the breakdown of the syllabus and the course
content you will be doing in a particular class. You will not be revisiting that often.
What you will be revisiting is the posts. So click on posts because that is where most
of the activity is. If you click on posts for this class I�ve got my posts for this
class arranged so you can access the syllabus, the game plan, study guides, lecture notes,
the first lecture has a link here to information about an online mBA program. You can always
expand a note by clicking on the right arrow here and if I were to do that in this case
you�ll see there�s actually a lot more going on in that post than my simply listing
the assignments or the material that needs to be completed. So I encourage you to take
advantage of the posts. Click on the right to make sure you have read all of the instructions
because what an instructor will do will to tell you minimally. What needs to be read
before a particular lecture can be completed, another assignment that needs to be completed.
But I am going to collapse this view just because I want you to be able to see the assignments.
And I scroll down here to another post that I had which in this case was on a theory called
�dualism.� So you can see the reading assignment that needs to be completed, the
lecture that needs to be completed after the student does the reading, and the lecture
notes which is a PDF that contains all the slides in a lecture. To download a lecture
what you�ll have to do is just double click or in this case press once on the lecture
itself. And when I do that the window sort of expands and you�ve got two options here.
You�ve got the downward arrow for downloading the lecture onto your device so that you can
play it back and then info that has a little eye. So info will tell you how big it is,
when it was uploaded, and all of that information. So in order to listen to the lecture you are
going to have to download it. So once you click download- in fact I�ll expand the
lecture notes, and again in order to access the lecture notes you have to download it.
So let me click on download for the lecture and the downward arrow is replaced by this
little circle and we�ll get a little status update on how fast the downloading is occurring.
So while this is downloading I am going to scroll down, click on download for the lecture
notes- you can see that the time this screenshot was taken most of the lecture had been downloaded,
I just started downloading the lecture notes. And what happens is when they are both downloaded
because, at least the way the Philosophy Department does lectures, the lectures are narrated podcasts
that are synced with slides of text. Unfortunately with the iTunes U app you cannot watch the
slides change as the lecture unfolds. You can when you are using Quicktime or the iTunes
application on your PC but you can�t watch those slides change automatically. So in order
to use the notes in conjunction with the lecture I typically tell folks to start the lecture.
In this case all you have to do is click on the little sound icon here for having the
lecture begin to play. Here you have the image for the course. You�ve got your ability
to play it at different rates, that is at the rate it was recorded versus a slower rate,
twice the rate. You can also adjust the play ahead to where it is you want it to play and
so on- any of that. This is playing right now. Actually this is a screen capture so
you can�t hear anything. While this is playing all I�ve got to do is click this back arrow
to go back to the post to then double click on the lecture notes so as the lecture is
playing in the background I can scroll through the lecture notes and follow through with
the lecture. It�s not quite as convenient as just downloading the lecture on your PC
and watching it play as a movie but it works pretty well. So let�s assume that you complete
the lecture, the lecture�s done, you can also mark off the things that you�ve done.
Keep track of the assignments and whatnot when you�re in the post view. I think students
find that a very useful feature. So other things you can do, alright, you�ve seen
the info, you�ve seen the posts. You click on notes and the iTunes U app allows you to
create notes for the course, to add your comments, notes about some audio or media thing you
might have had to watch. You can create notes for the books or the lectures- that is, the
text that you�re reading. Since I�m an instructor I never use this particular feature
but you may like it. The final thing I wanted to show you is the materials. Now the posts
have all the course materials organized based on specific content that�s whetted to the
outline. The materials is just a list of all the materials that have been uploaded and
made available to the students for the course. It�s typically organized alphabetically.
The instructor can also organize it in any way he or she wants but this�ll be just
a list of all the media all the materials. So I�ve got the link to our online B.A.
program, I�ve got the PDF of the syllabus. I�ve got the Game Plan, the Study Questions,
Lecture 1, Lecture 1 notes, Lecture 2, Lecture 2 notes and so on. So you can access the material
this way as well as through the posts. It�s ultimately whatever works for you. Once you�ve
downloaded a few classes- in fact you download a single class, you�ll know how this works.
The iTunes U app on the iPad works essentially the same way as it does on either the iPhone
or the iPod. It�s just that the iPad allows you to see a lot more real estate. But it
turns out the most common way in which folks access iTunes U content 9at least for our
UNO classes) is gonna be through their iPhone. So if you have any problems, issues, or complaints,
or need help there�s a couple of things you can do. You can email me at philosophy@uno.edu
or itunes@uno.edu both of these will be sure to get to me. And if you want to learn how
to access iTunes U content from your iPhone or your iPad or from your home computer I
have separate tutorials for those.