Driving the Classroom with iTunes U

There was a time when iTunes U was just a section of the iTunes store where you could download audio and videos. Since Apple's recent education event, that's all changed. iTunes U is still a part of the iTunes Store but there's now a dedicated iTunes U app for iOS devices.

The other major change to iTunes U was a policy change. iTunes U was previously only available to universities. At the January education event Eddy Cue stated that "starting today K-12 schools can sign up" to iTunes U. We didn't get pre-announcement access but I signed up as soon as I could and Cedars has been accepted to iTunes U.

I've made a Flickr set of iTunes U screenshots. It's embedded here, or you can go and watch it bigger (and in HTML5) at Flickr.

I've been obliquely but enthusiastically tweeting about iTunes U since its launch. Here's why.

What iTunes U Provides

Most people understand iTunes U as a part of the iTunes Store where you can download academic content for free. That content was usually an ordered playlist of videos or audio files. Some courses also offered PDF versions of slide decks, reading lists or other notes. That was pretty much it.

If you wanted to use these materials, you just downloaded them to your computer or iOS device and listened to or viewed them.

What Apple announced at the recent education event was a new iOS app dedicated to iTunes U content. The app looks a lot like iBooks except the shelves are Harvard-mahogany instead of Ikea-birch.

The idea now is that you can create a complete course in iTunes U, not just a playlist.

What is an iTunes U Course?

There are two types of iTunes U Course. The first, and most familiar, is what's called a "self-paced" course. A self-paced course is a complete syllabus, along with materials and assignments that you can download and work through at your leisure.

For schools, though, the beauty is in the "in-session" course. This is how you use iTunes U to run your classroom. An in-session course is one that's currently running and you, as the teacher, add to it in real time.

An iTunes U course of either type can contain three things: Info, Posts and Materials. The app provides a fourth space for you: Notes. These four sections represent the structure of the iTunes U app. Each gets its own tab.

I want to talk about each of these in turn, but slightly out of order.

Course Info

Course info is basically a number of styled text pages containing information about the course. There are three pages created by default:

• Course Overview - General information about the course, contents, dates and so on.
• Course Instructor - Biographical information about the teacher who created the course.
• Course Outline - a syllabus list.

There's no restriction on these pages and you can add others. Some examples of others you might include:

• Information about specific equipment required in class
• Lab safety rules
• Plans for class-related trips
• Dates and places of exams

Basically, anything that's germane to the course can be put into an info page.

Materials

In the original incarnation of iTunes U, all we had was a list of course 'materials' - where materials was defined as audio, video and PDFs. In the new iTunes U the definition of materials is substantially expanded and the integration of these materials with the course is far deeper.

There are basically three kinds of material you can add to your course:

• A link into an Apple storefront: iTunes Store, iBooks Store, iOS App Store
• A file you upload from your computer
• A link to something on the web

There's a lot of power in that first item. You can link to almost anything that Apple vends through a store front:

• iOS Apps
• iBooks
• Movies
• Audiobooks
• Individual items in a podcast feed
• Individual songs in an album
• Individual items in another iTunes U course

There are some objects in the stores you cannot link to:

• Albums in iTunes
• Podcast feeds in iTunes
• Other iTunes U courses

When you link to something in the store, iTunes U will fill in the metadata for you. When a student subscribes to your course, there are controls right in the iTunes U app to buy or download the store items.

You can also upload files from your computer. The files will be hosted on Apple's servers and made available to download by students. This is pretty important because what this means is that you don't have to rewrite all your materials in iBooks Author or publish them on an Apple store in order to adopt iTunes U. Just take your PDFs, images, videos, whatever and put them in your materials list.

Finally, you can link to anything on the web. Along with the URL itself, you can attach some metadata to the link:

• Name
• Author/Speaker
• Description
• "Explicit" flag

iTunes U will do a nice job of pulling in metadata from the iTunes Store for links into the stores but it doesn't do anything for URLs. It would be hard to do that in the general case but perhaps a little more could be done for the big sites like Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and Wikipedia.

When you subscribe to an iTunes U course, the app does not download the course materials automatically. In the app, the student can tap a "download" button to cache the materials on the device. If space becomes tight, it's always possible to delete the material and re-download it later. This is particularly useful if you have a situation where students might not have internet access at home.

If you have plentiful internet access and storage on the device, you can enable an auto-download setting. This will make the iTunes U app download any materials that are subsequently added to the course over time.

Notes

The third tab in the iTunes U app is called Notes. There are two kinds of notes:

• Course Notes
• Book Notes

A Course Note is simply a text note that you enter in iTunes U. It is a bit of a shame that you can't attach an image from Photos to a note but perhaps that will come.

A Book Note is a highlighted or annotated section of an iBook that is associated with the course through the materials list. The idea goes like this:

Say you subscribe to a course and download the course textbook. As you're reading in iBooks, you highlight and annotate the important parts of the book. Back in iTunes U, the Notes tab is accumulating all of these notes and annotations in one place for review.

You can't highlight the text of a book from within iTunes U but the annotation sync between iTunes U and iBooks goes both ways. If you annotate a highlight in iBooks, that annotation appears in iTunes U. If you highlight a section in iBooks, that highlight appears in iTunes U. If you then add a note to that highlight in iTunes U, it appears next to the highlight in iBooks.

It's worth noting that you don't have to publish a book to the world through the iBooks store to get this integration. It also works for ePub and iBooks files that you upload and deliver as a downloadable course material item.

Posts

I come to Posts last because Posts are the beating heart of iTunes U that integrate the materials and drive the course. A post is a styled-text message with a subject that can be attached to any part of the course outline.

Posts can also have an assignment attached. An assignment is an additional piece of explanatory text with an optional deadline and one or more course material items attached.

When the teacher posts a message to the course it automatically appears in the Posts section of the course in every student's iTunes U app. More than that, though, it will send a push notification to every device subscribed to the course.

Each post has a read/unread status and the iTunes U app provides a unified inbox for posts. The inbox has two views: all posts, sorted by date received, or assignments only - sorted by due date.

So how might you use Posts in class? Well the most obvious use case is to send out a message to the students. Since we started the iPad project, I've been looking for a simple way to push-notify pupils about things. iTunes U provides it.

Secondly, you can use it to set homework assignments. We currently use email to do this but we've found that some students struggle to adequately process their email to extract actionable information. With iTunes U, all of the actionable items arising from homework appear directly in a list called "Assignments", sorted by most-immediately-due. Huge win.

Some quick ideas for course materials:

• Test paper in PDF with embedded forms that can be completed on the iPad
• A partly-completed artwork for pupils to build on and submit via email
• Links to study materials on the web
• A template for a moodboard or digital collage that pupils have to complete on or afer a school trip
• A framework OmniGraphSketcher document for pupils to identify parts of and complete
• Any kind of course notes document in some readable format
• Photo captures of whiteboards used in class or PDF exports of iPad-based digital whiteboards

I can further imagine teachers subscribing to the other courses that the children in their classes are taking. They'll be able to see what other teachers are planning and the materials that are being used. They'll be able to see other teachers' homework due dates and maybe even get ideas for cross-curricular links or project work that could tie-in with other classes.

Finally, we are often asked by parents to notify them when their children are set any homework at all so that they can ensure it gets done. With the best will in the world, it can be hard enough to administer homework to all your pupils without having to administer it to their parents as well.

One major use case I can see for iTunes U is simply having the parents subscribe to the courses their children are involved in. They'll see all the goings-on in the course; they'll be push-notified of any additional information and they'll have a pocketable list of all their child's assignments. Schools pay very good money for systems like this and iTunes U provides it for free.

Syncing and Deployment Implications

iTunes U syncs through iCloud. Subscribe to a course on your iPhone, it's subscribed on your iPad. Annotate a book on your iPad, the notes appear in iTunes U on your phone. There are a couple of deployment considerations arising from this.

Primarily, this is another nail in the coffin of the "shared Apple ID" deployment model that we've been using up until now. If you have multiple pupils and devices all using the same Apple ID, you're going to get sync issues all over the place. Pupils' notes will intermingle, their read/unread statuses will get mixed up. It will be a hot mess.

This is one of many reasons why we're moving to individual Apple IDs next year. I'll write more on that in due course.

Beyond that, though, there are no other major infrastructure or deployment issues around adopting iTunes U. You administer the course through a website and access it through iTunes U on iOS.

Subscribing, Security and Privacy

How does a pupil subscribe to a course? For self-paced courses, they navigate to the school's iTunes U page and click the Subscribe button. For in-session courses that won't be listed on iTunes, the course administrator can copy a URL from the course management portal and share that with students.

Opening the URL on an iOS device will launch iTunes U and prompt the user to subscribe to the course. There is no other authentication. It's important to realise that what you're creating on iTunes U is not a "private course". It's an "unlisted course". It doesn't appear in iTunes search but, if someone acquires the URL, they will be able to subscribe to the course.

Nowhere in iTunes U does there exist a "list of subscribers" to a course. This means that the teacher must treat the contents of the iTunes U course as if it were being posted on the public internet. After all, it is being posted on the public internet - it's just that unlisted iTunes U courses are part of the deep web, not the surface web.

It will be important for teachers to keep aware of this fact and avoid posting personal information through iTunes U. For example, one might be tempted to post digitally-marked test papers back through iTunes U. That's not a suitable approach and it's why iTunes U is not a replacement for a real school-wide email system.

Rebuilding on Top of iTunes U

In Scotland, we're in the middle of curriculum transition. Secondary teachers are preparing to start teaching all-new National 4 and 5 courses. Knowing that these new courses were coming, we have not spent time rebuilding the old courses and materials for the iPad-enabled world. Starting now, though, we're going to base everything we do in Secondary on iTunes U.

There are two sides to digital workflow in school. There's the information distribution and communication side and there's the submission, grading and feedback side.

It's important to understand that iTunes U only attacks the first part: information distribution and communication. It is not a test-taking, file submission and grading system. Neither does it track student progress through a course.

Here's how we currently handle information distribution: email. It's almost all through email. Files as attachments, course announcements and all kinds of other information go out to the kids by email. For the most part, this works. We all know the down-sides of email very well but it is at least free, fast and reliable. For files that are larger than email can handle, we're using shared folders through Dropbox. The pupils use a combination of Course Notes, Calendar and Notes to manage their assignments.

We're going to replace all of this with iTunes U.

iTunes U will allow us to unify:

• Class announcements
• Homework setting (and homework diary)
• Access to digital course materials
• Other class information

…into one app that everyone can use.

I stand by my earlier analysis that iBooks Author and iTunes U were the two most important parts of Apple's recent education announcement. With iBooks Author, we now have a very simple way to make high-quality electronic texts for use in the classroom. It will be to course materials what Keynote was to presentations.

iTunes U is a massively powerful tool for running a classroom full of iOS devices. It's extremely simple to use for teachers and the overhead of adoption is as close to zero as you can get: install iTunes U, upload some materials and post class messages and assignments as you go along.

I'm incredibly excited about iTunes U.

Digital Exams on the iPad

It's prelim week at Cedars. In Scotland, pupils with additional needs can use a “Digital Question Paper” to complete their exam.

A DQP is a PDF with embedded forms. The pupil sits at a computer and fills in the form to answer the questions. For exams involving graphs, equations or other hard-to-do-on-the-computer things, they can also switch to working on paper. At the end of the exam, the PDF is printed out and the exam goes away on paper with the rest to be marked.

So this week it's been my job to get this going. I thought it would be useful to write down the process and considerations for doing this on our computer infrastructure.

Can you do this on an iPad? Of course you can.

The PDF Bit

The first consideration is how to complete a PDF form on an iPad. After trying a number of different PDF apps, I settled on PDF Expert by Readdle. PDF expert does a great job of annotating PDFs, completing forms and saving, emailing and printing.

Network Setup

I used the Timed Access feature of Airport Utility to blacklist the WiFi MAC addresses of the iPads we're using for the exams. The pupils don't know our WiFi password - at least they shoudn't; we deploy wifi settings by configuration profile - but blacklisting the MACs gives belt and braces security.

We don't have any other open wifi networks visible from within our school but it's always possible that a pupil could enable tethering on their iPhone before handing the phone over at the start of the exam.

We counter this by keeping the phones in another part of the school from the exam room and using Kismet to check for the appearance of new APs before the exam starts.

It would be very helpful if it were possible to disable connecting to arbitrary networks but that's not currently an option.

Because we need to print the papers at the end of the exam, we need some kind of networking capability so that the iPads can reach a networked printer.

I set up a Mac mini with an ethernet connection to a printer. I then had the Mac create a wifi network and installed Printopia to make the printer visible to AirPrint. This worked well enough but I found that the iPads occasionally failed to reconnect to the ad-hoc network after sleep. In future, I'll use a real Airport base station for this.

The Mac mini had no connection to the Internet and was freshly reinstalled so that no additional software or content was available and all network services were off - apart from Printopia and the ad-hoc wifi network.

Network Security

Whenever we talk about using computers in exams, the question of data security and computer isolation comes up. I went through this in some detail and tried to lock down the iPads we're using for the exams as far as possible.

Here's what I did.

Firstly, take an iPad and restore it to factory settings. We used spare iPads for this but you could equally back up and erase the pupil's own iPad for the duration of the exams.

Next, install PDF Expert from the App Store.

At this point, I put together a configuration profile for exam iPads and installed it via iPhone Configuration Utility. In the profile, I turned off the following (and pretty much everything else I could turn off):

• Turn off Safari
• Turn off YouTube
• Turn off installing apps
• Turn off the iTunes store
• Turn off iCloud syncing, backup and Photo Stream

I set the profile to never be removable, which means you have to restore the device to remove the profile. Something that can't be done in the exam hall - at least, not without deleting the exam paper and the app too!

In addition, there is a setting in Settings > General > Restrictons that's useful. It's the "Allow changes" option for Accounts. You can't hide Mail via configuration as you can with Safari and YouTube but disabling "Allow changes" prevents the user from setting up a Mail account on the device.

Let's assume the worst: that, even with all the above in place, the pupil could still get access to the public Internet. If that happened, this device would still:

• be unable to surf the web, as Safari is disabled
• be unable to install any content from the App Store or iTunes because they are disabled
• be unable to receive any information by email because setting up email accounts is disabled

The only remaining vector for information is iMessage. It's currently not possible to completely disable iMessage by configuration, so you need to think about network defences.

Since we erased the iPads before we started, iMessage is unconfigured. In order to set up iMessage, the device must be able to sign in to iCloud and communicate with Apple's servers. Without access to the public internet, it's not possible for the iPads in the exam hall to be set up to communicate with each other.

Attack Tree

Having done all this, I decided to develop an attack tree for cheating while doing exams on an iPad. The tree is below, but here's the minimum you would need to do:

1. Set up some kind of hotspot that Kismet can't detect in range of the exam hall
2. Connect to it during the exam
3. Sign in to iMessage
4. Relay each question to a knowledgable conspirator outside the exam hall
5. Receive each answer and paste it into the exam paper

…all without being detected by the invigilator. That's a pretty sophisticated, well-resourced and coordinated attack for a school pupil but I'm not deluding myself that such an attack is impossible. It's not. With proper invigilation it shouldn't be a problem but I would feel happier if iMessage could be disabled or if I could lock the device onto one network only. I may be over-thinking it a bit.

The purpose of exam invigilation is not to absolutely prevent any cheating. It's to prevent any undetected cheating. The decision to make an attempt lies with the individual candidate and they should be detected and suffer the consequences.

At the same time, I'm defending this system against 15-18 year old kids from Greenock, not GCHQ and the NSA. It's important not to go overboard with the paranoia.

That's how we're doing Digital Question Papers on iPad.

(Please bear in mind that I am by no means a security expert and I don't claim that this analysis is bulletproof.)

Something Very Special and Very Historically Different

"Right now, if you buy a computer system and you want to solve one of your problems, we immediately throw a big problem right in the middle of you and your problem which is learning how to use the computer. A substantial problem to overcome. Once you overcome that, it's a phenomenal tool. But there is a barrier of having to overcome that problem.

What we're trying to do … is to remove that barrier so that someone can buy a computer system who knows nothing about it and directly attack their problem without learning how to program their computer.

Our whole company, our whole philosophical base, is founded on one principle. That principle is that there is something very special and very historically different that takes place when you have one computer and one person. Very different than if you have ten people and one computer."

Steve Jobs, 1980

This is why I get up in the morning. I have nothing to add.

Thoughts on iBooks

Jason Snell at Macworld asked me for my take on Apple's announcements at their recent education event in New York City. Here are a few excerpts.

On the state of ebook use in schools:

The ownership model for ebooks is out of step with the way schools buy and use most books. Unfortunately, Apple’s announcement didn’t change that much. I had hoped that on Thursday we would see a mechanism for checking books out and back into some kind of “school library” through iBooks. Instead we got a modest price cut on textbooks alone.

On iBooks Author:

It’s almost like Pages and Keynote got together and produced a child. ... iBooks Author can do for books what Keynote did for presentations: an accessible way to create very high-quality results with little effort.

On the new iTunes U app:

If you’ve ever tried to “take” a course from iTunes U, you may have found it a bit frustrating. It was never really a full course, just some lecture materials and a reading list. Where are the books? Where are the exercises? It was difficult for course authors to communicate the intended progression of learning.

With iTunes U, Apple has solved the problem of communicating the learning journey. It’s no longer “read this PDF, then watch these videos.” Courses can now contain audio, video, documents, links to iOS apps and iBooks. There’s deep integration between iBooks and iTunes U through which notes and highlights from a book can be reviewed in the iTunes U app.

Commercial iBooks textbooks are a marketing head fake. They're the equivalent of carbon fibre buggy whips. iTunes U is the game changer. Put iBooks Author and iTunes U into the hands of great teachers, put iPads in their students hands, put them all in a room together then step back and see what happens. That's the ballgame.

The full piece is over at Macworld.

Hire Me?

As it's the start of the year, I thought I'd mention that you can hire me to help your school or organisation with iOS deployment. There are more details on fraserspeirs.com but, in brief, I can help you with:

• Planning the change management process
• All technical aspects of iOS deployment
• Mobile Device Management
• How to deal with App Store accounts and volume purchase

For schools in particular, I can also help with:

• Staff development around 1:1 teaching and iOS
• Helping teachers and parents understand the school's educational goals with 1:1/iOS
• Setting educational goals around mobile devices in the classroom
• Integration of iOS into existing systems
• Deploying Mac OS X Server Profile Manager (or other MDM systems)
• Developing acceptable use policies to cover 1:1 deployments
• Evaluating lease vs. buy arrangements
• Planning and deploying Wi-Fi and broadband upgrades to support 1:1

I'm happy to travel worldwide and I'm happy to work with you remotely. Whatever fits your needs and budget.

If you're interested in working with me before the summer, please get in touch as soon as possible. The diary is filling up!