Apple says iBooks Textbooks and iTunes U Course Manager are expanding into new markets across Asia, Latin America, Europe and elsewhere around the world.
iBooks Textbooks bring Multi-Touch textbooks with dynamic, current and interactive content to teachers and students in 51 countries now including Brazil, Italy and Japan. iTunes U Course Manager, available in 70 countries now including Russia, Thailand and Malaysia, allows educators to create and distribute courses for their own classrooms, or share them publicly, on the iTunes U app.
iBooks Textbooks offer iPad users fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, rotating 3D diagrams, flick-through photo galleries and tap-to-play videos. iBooks Textbooks don’t weigh down a backpack, can be updated as events unfold and don’t need to be returned, says Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. With nearly 25,000 educational titles created by independent publishers, teachers and leading education services companies, including new educational content from Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Hodder Education, iBooks Textbooks now cover 100 percent of US high school core curriculum and the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) core curriculum in the UK.
With iTunes U Course Manager educators can share their knowledge and resources directly with their class or to a global audience on iTunes U. This free iOS app gives learners access to the world’s largest online catalog of free educational content from top schools, leading universities and prominent 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 revolutionary App Store.
