iBook, iAuthors and the iTunesU from Apple, a great step towards changing the education system. For those who underestimated the announcement, this was a huge wake up call! Apple have been busy doing what they do best and that is innovating! Though targeted at schools and colleges and students right now, the impact that this could have on higher education companies, publishers, universities and colleges is mind boggling!
In one go, Apple has entered the eBook marketplace (taking on Amazon) in a big way, authoring tool space (Adobe must be really scratching their head with the free iAuthor) and into the realm of online education and learning (traditional companies that service the online colleges and universities and educational institutions as well). It would be interesting to track the share prices of some of the companies that are going to be impacted by the iBook, iAuthor and the iTunes.
It’s surprising how all the focus till now has only been on the impact these 3 Apps can make on the school and university level education. Think a little and you will be able to see the correlation these apps have with the eLearning industry.
- For content authors who work on Macs instead of PCs, you have a free authoring tool to create an interactive book or manual as opposed to using a paid authoring or epublishing tool.
- iAuthor may just prove to be the solution we are all looking for interactive learning courses on the iPad. If Apple’s lack of support for Flash means that we have to create courses for the iPad using HTML-based authoring tools, then perhaps this may a authoring tool which we must have in our skillsets in the future for an iWorld. Agreed that the initial Apple’s EULA (i.e. every piece created using iAuthor must be circulated through iBookstore) does not support the conventional client –vendor relationship. But if we step aside the legal ambiguity for a while and analyze it in terms of technical possibilities, it could be bang on. (Note: Apple has since backtracked on this but there are still some grey areas around the other ways to distribute the output created from iAuthor.)
- Also not all eLearning courses are custom designed for a client. Generic courses or vocational courses that apply to students who want to skill-up or employees/organizations/industries at large can be developed and sold through iTunesU. So iTunesU could be an alternative destination for interactive courses to be sold. I am sure eLearning catalog companies who have been building courses to run off their own LMS or client LMS (using SCORM standards) could have another potential revenue generator (and share some with Apple of course!). Again it does not fit with existing client-vendor models, but that’s what Apple is known for, revolutionizing existing models.
So, are iBook, iAuthors and the iTunesU all set to make that impact? Maybe not till, Apple has explored and substantially altered the education landscape. After all, the correlations pointed above are unintended by Apple as of now and they would certainly like to make necessary changes before officially targeting the online training industry. How soon will that be? Very soon is our bet!
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These applications are used in e learning. These have really changed the education system. Thanks for sharing this post. Really very useful.
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AApl is full of surprises but imho, it’s not gonna happen anytime soon. It will take some time before they fully ‘reinvent’ the textbook industry (although we’re counting on it).
Hey BowStrings, firstly thanks for participating in the discussion. We are suggesting what Apple is capable of doing with their latest apps and yeah it may take them a while to reinvent the textbook industry, but they have started on with the process.
As you say Apple if full of surprises, guess we will have to see how sooner they can do it.
I’ve been working in the field of on-line learning (at university level in Sweden) and I’ve seen the ‘ketchup effect’ happen several times in the last 20 years. That’s when you used to get ketchup in glass bottles which you had to turn upside down and shake and shake … until it all came out at once!
That’s what I think is happening in the e-learning field right now. We’ve had a full set of tools with which to work for three or four years now (as computers, programs and networks improved) – but teachers are only just starting to work with them.
In the department in which I work, the ratio of ‘purely campus’:'on-line courses’ changed from about 70:30 in January 2010 to about 25:75 today. That’s quite a rate of change in such a short space of time! And as teachers become more and more used to the set-up and the tools, they become more and more creative in how they can be used, so we’re expecting purely-campus courses to more or less disappear in the very near future. The campus student flats will continue to be full, but young students are already treating the campus as a sort of ‘theme park’, where they come to have fun and be with their peers … but they do their serious studying on-line … from those student flats … but sometimes even from places like Thailand (where their student loan money goes much further and the weather’s nicer!).