ITunes U
In May 2007, Apple announced the launch of iTunes U via the iTunes Store, which delivers university lectures from top U.S. colleges. With iTunes version 12.7 in August 2017, iTunes U collections became a part of the Podcasts app.
On 10 June 2020, Apple formally announced that iTunes U will be discontinued from the end of 2021
Archiving
There are three main branches of iTunes U which are:
- Beyond Campus
- K12
- University
Each has a list of institutions, each institution can have many courses. It is common for courses in the same institution to share files with other courses in the same institution.
URLs
- Get Institution with list of courses: https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/DZR.woa/wa/viewArtist?id={INSTITUTION_ID}
- Get Course Data: https://itunesu.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/LZDirectory.woa/ra/directory/courses/{COURSE_GUID}/feed
The following URL can garner more meta details for organizing, this is the URL used by iTunes U app but requires you to subscribe to the course, then use the cookie to request and get the meta.
https://p1-u.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/LZStudent.woa/ra/feed/{COURSE_GUID}
User Agent
In some cases if you want to pull data from iTunes links you can set the following user agent in your request.
"user-agent", "iTunesU/3.8 iOS/13.3 model/iPad6,7 hwp/s8001 build/17C54 (5; dt:111) iTunesU/3.8"
Archiving Status
Beyond Campus
Beyond Campus has 85 institutions and is the smallest subset of the three, it has been fully archived as of 20/11/2020, total size roughly is 750GB.
Example course uploaded to IA, the course is called "Addressing Learning Disabilities in the Inclusive Classroom" from "Alberta Teachers Association".
https://archive.org/details/addressing_learning_disabilities_in_the_inclusive_classroom
Each upload contains a meta file for the course, in this example. addressing_learning_disabilities_in_the_inclusive_classroom.json which contains all the meta for course description, file descriptions and course content.
Institution | Courses | Archive Link |
---|---|---|
Alberta Teachers Association | 27 | Archive |
Apple Distinguished Educators | 172 | Archive |
Art Gallery of New South Wales | 1 | Archive |
ASCD | 39 | |
ASCO University | 2 | Archive |
Aslico - Opera Education | 0 | |
Assembly of First Nations | 2 | |
Signum University | 27 | Archive |