iTunes U Enrolment and Apple IDs

As I mentioned in my last post, there are some new arrangements for iTunes U courses, specifically the ability to distribute an "enrolment code" and have students sign up to the course in the iTunes U app using their Apple ID.

This seems like the obvious way to do things but in many school deployments, students are not in control of the Apple ID that their device uses. Sometimes that's because the devices are shared (in which case, using iTunes U is going to be difficult anyway) but more often it's because the school is in a country that doesn't have a Volume Purchase Program yet. That most countries still don't is another grumpy discussion for another time.

Anyway, at first glance it seems that you absolutely need individual Apple IDs to enrol students in a course now. I've always been keen on handing over as much IT autonomy to the student as possible, and that's where I think we should all be aiming, but changing your AppleID structures is a once-a-year thing to do and no small matter. Is there a workaround in the meantime?

It turns out that there is: to create a course that students can subscribe to without entering AppleID credentials, you have to:

• Create the course in Course Manager - this creates a private course with an enrolment roster.

• Submit the course to the person who controls your institution's iTunes U Public Site Manager

• Have them 'hide' the course in PSM.

This creates a course which has a direct URL for subscription (it's referred to as the 'Audit URL' in iTunes U) but which does not require Apple ID credentials to subscribe to.

This isn't an ideal solution as it requires coordination between all the course authors at an institution and the person running the Public Site Manager. Still, it works for now and the future is ever more clearly heading towards individual Apple IDs for individual students. That's where I'm recommending all new 1:1s start their thinking but, still, always the two stumbling blocks of no Volume Purchase and COPPA's lower limit of 13-years-old for an iTunes account. I hope we can get these things ironed out soon.

What's New in iTunes U

As you know, I'm a fan of the new iTunes U app and course management service. Apple just released an update to both the app and the service that brings a few new and important features.

You might want to review my previous article on iTunes U if you're not familiar with it.

The iTunes U App

The iTunes U app was updated to version 1.2 today and contains a couple of cool features.

Firstly, you can now search across all your subscribed courses or within a course. The search encompasses materials, notes and posts. If you can't find how to search across all your courses, the magnifying glass is tucked up underneath the 'top shelf' - pull the bookshelves down to find it.

There are enhancements to note taking. The first iteration of the app would allow you to create two kinds of notes: Course Notes, which were plain text notes typed into iTunes U, and Book Notes which were annotated book highlights synced from iBooks. Until now, it's been pretty difficult to take notes on a video you're watching because, well, you were already using the screen to watch the video (unless you had an AppleTV!).

In iTunes U 1.2, there's now a split-screen mode for taking notes on a video while you watch it. Each note is timecoded to the video and you see markers in the video track for the related notes. As you watch the video later - say, for review - the notes will scroll into place as the playback head passes their timecode. These notes created from audio or video resources also now have their own section in the Notes tab in iTunes U.

Here's a little screenshot I posted earlier to Twitter, showing the new in-video note taking UI:

The new in-video note taking UI in iTunes U is made of win. twitter.com/fraserspeirs/s…

— Fraser Speirs (@fraserspeirs) July 25, 2012

iTunes U Course Manager

Course Manager is the part of iTunes U that an individual teacher uses on a daily basis to run their course. It has previously been possible to create a 'private' course (i.e. a course that is not listed on the iTunes U Catalogue). The latest Course Manager update introduces a Roster feature that provides true private courses, with control of who can subscribe to the course.

Previously, the only way to share a course was by sharing a URL. Beyond the assumption that the obscure URL wouldn't be guessable, there was really no way for a teacher to know who had subscribed to the course.

Now, you can share an invitation code with students that they can use to enrol in your course. There is an "Enrol" button at the bottom of the iTunes U Catalogue in the new course. When a student enters a code here, they are asked to provide their Apple ID password and agree to their details (name and email address) being shared with the course creator. As before, you can generate a link which has the enrol code embedded in it for easy enrolment via email.

As far as I can tell, all enrolment requests require approval by the course creator. It is possible to close a course to new enrolment requests, as well as blocking certain individuals and regenerating the course enrolment code if it has become too widely known. There appears to be no feature to pre-load a course with an approved roster.

Finally, there's another feature in Course Manager that I've wanted for a while: draft posts. When you create an in-session course (that is, a course that's built up as teaching progresses), you add content in the form of materials attached to posts. Previously, when you created a post, it immediately went live. Now, we have an option to save a post as a draft and send it out to students only when you click "Post".

This is useful in all sorts of ways. I'm particularly looking forward to being able to get my Monday all set before I step into school that day. It will also be helpful in situations where a teacher is off sick - as long as they have the strength to log into Course Manager from their death-bed, they can still set the lesson work. As an enhancement, it would be nice to have the ability to schedule posts.

So, all in all, a nice update to both the app and the backend service that supports it.

Thoughts on Apple's WWDC Announcements

So WWDC is once again upon us and a whole slew of announcements from Apple. I don't propose to go over every single point, but just to pick out a few highlights that interested me.

Mountain Lion

Obviously, a lot of Mountain Lion stuff was about bringing features or concepts again back to the Mac from iOS. Broadly speaking, I like this idea. The only part that particularly caught my eye for the classroom is AirPlay Mirroring for Macs. I know I've been banging on and on about AppleTV for a long time now, but Mountain Lion completes the AV story for Apple-based classrooms.

Farewell, cables and adapters. I won't miss you one bit. Think about it this way: if you save yourself the replacement cost of three lost adapters, you've paid for an AppleTV.

iOS 6

I thought the iOS 6 announcement contained a few interesting features for schools. At the same time, I don't think I've seen an iOS release yet that has been so nakedly aggressive towards Apple's competitors. If you move through the announcements, someone was in the firing line of just about every one:

• Maps: Google Maps
• Siri: Google search
• Facebook: Google+
• Passbook: Google Wallet

Are you starting to notice a pattern? I'm not a Google hater. In many ways, I rather wish that we could turn the clock back to 2007 and that 'merger without merging' that Eric Schmidt talked about with the integration of Google Maps on the original iPhone. Still, we are where we are and the current intense competition is certainly spurring some welcome innovations.

Siri on the iPad is an interesting one. Despite the hype, not many kids are carrying iPhone 4S hardware yet. Many kids are and will be carrying iPads with Siri enabled. Siri isn't great today but it is already useful. What does it look like in 5 years? In ten? How does the classroom work when you can ask Siri instead of a teacher? I have no idea, but that day is coming and I'm trying to figure out the answer before it arrives.

I need to look in more detail at the security arrangements but Shared Photo Streams may be incredibly useful in classroom situations. When teachers need to move images to students and back, this will beat the heck out of emailing photos. You go on a trip and want everyone to pool their photos for an exercise at the end? Bingo.

I'm extremely interested in Passbook, Apple's centralised ticket, loyalty card and boarding pass app. I keep chewing over how we could leverage something like this into a way for pupils to register themselves in school by scanning their "school pass" on their device. I haven't installed the beta yet but, unfortunately, it looks like Passbook isn't on the iPad - only the iPhone and iPod touch. I get why - it's a new technology and the pocket-sized devices are the 80% use case. In my opinion, though, that's a missed opportunity for some more creative uses.

I also thought that Passbook vs. Google Wallet was another interesting example of two different strategies. In Google's world, you need a phone with an NFC chip built in. There are only about five phones with the requisite hardware available: the Nexus, two LG phones and the Sprint Galaxy SIII. That's not a lot of units in the field. By contrast, Apple's strategy is to turn any pocket-sized device that can run iOS 5 into a payment token. That's a lot of devices already in the field that will become payment hubs overnight when iOS 6 ships. I don't feel qualified to say which approach is better from a security or commercial point of view but I thought it was reminiscent of the argument for building the software keyboard on the original iPhone: you can go back and add a feature when you think of it, instead of waiting for new hardware.

Finally, let's talk accessibility. Education got a few mentions in the keynote and making the curriculum accessible to children with additional needs is something that should concern us all. The Guided Access feature, which locks out certain areas of the screen, is going to be very useful for people working with children with any kind of attention issues or motor control problems. At the same time, the ability to lock out the home button will find several uses in kiosks, museums and other specific-use situations.

I do slightly worry, though, that some teachers will abuse the lockout feature to turn iPads into glorified single-purpose textbook devices. I hope not - but I have seen some crazy hacks on iPads in schools to add just this level of "control". Urgh.

The iPad 1

My main disappointment is that iOS 6 will not arrive on the iPad 1. I had factored this possibility into my thinking when we signed a 3-year lease on our current hardware. We are tied into our lease until summer 2013, when we will refresh all of our devices. What does that really mean?

Well, iOS 6 is due in the autumn - which probably means late September or early October. That's not a good time to do a big OS upgrade across the school. When iOS 5 came out around that time, I went ahead and did the update on our devices. That was a mistake. It took WAY too much time out of my diary at that point in the school year. This time around, I'd at least wait for Christmas to do the update. So we're probably looking at 6 or 8 months of working with iOS devices running the previous generation of software, depending on how you count it.

I do have one big concern, though: mismatch between teachers' software and pupils' versions of iWork. We see this happening when new versions of Pages and Keynote come out: teachers update their devices promptly and create documents. Those documents are sent to pupils who have the older version of Pages and they won't open.

Usually, you can solve this with a quick update on the device concerned. Now, though, we may find ourselves in the situation where the teachers have moved to iOS 6 and iWork version 1.7 and the kids are stuck on iOS 5 and the current iWork 1.6 apps - with no document compatibility. The solution, I guess, is to hold the teachers' versions back but eventually someone will hit "Update All" and there will be no way to roll back. I hope the iWork apps have matured to the point where cross-version file compatibility can be maintained, at least for a while.

These are the perils of being an early adopter, and I knew they were coming.

Cedars School of Excellence on iTunes U

I'm pleased to announce the humble beginnings of Cedars School of Excellence's iTunes U site.

The first three courses focus on specific activities you might wish to do on an iPad:

• Using iBooks and iTunes U
• Using Twitter and Flipboard
• Using Keynote

These courses are billed as professional development for teachers but we think they have a broader use. We realised that, when you do a 1:1 deployment, you may well be sending an iOS device into a home that doesn't know very much about iOS.

We wanted to create some brief materials that could be used to give parents and pupils support for activities done on iPad at home. Too often, we have failed to provide support for parents trying to help with ICT homework and these courses are a first step towards trying to fix that.

The courses are available worldwide and for free through iTunes U. I would love to hear any feedback you have on these courses and, if you find them useful, please rate and review them on iTunes U.

The Web Kids' Kids

I have James Bridle to thank for recently reminding me of Piotr Czerski's The Web Kids. I used a portion of that piece in my presentation at the Covent Garden Apple Store last week:

We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment.

We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online.

The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us.

Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.

I know what you think I'm going to say next: that these are the children we are teaching today. That we need to change our teaching approach to cater for this shift.

Wrong. The people Czserski describes are not today's pupils but the parents of today's pupils. Those who were teenagers coming of age when the consumer Internet arrived in the mid-90s are today's thirtysomethings whose five-year-olds are enrolling in your schools right now.

The transition to teaching 'digital children' is long since past. In a sense, they're our missed generation. The children whose first baby photos were digital are about to enter university.

We have five to seven years - maybe ten - until Czserski's Web Kids are the majority of parents. This is a trend that will never reverse itself, so we had better figure out how to meet these parents' aspirations for their children. These parents who grew up fast and online; who adopted laptops and mobile phones, then smartphones and who are now embracing iPad and Kindle.

Computers aren't an afterthought for these post-digital Web Parents. They're not even a thought – they just are.